For the last while I’ve felt like our monthly electricity bill has been creeping up significantly. I generally pay the bills in a rush of paperwork, so can’t claim to have been paying careful attention, but a simple check of January 2021 ($95.78) to January 2026 ($180.95) showed me that my intuition was right.

I set out to find the reason.

Fortunately, for the last 12 years I’ve been archiving my home electricity usage using a little device tucked away in a cupboard that connects to my electric meter every few minutes and grabs the current reading. I’ve archived over 750,000 readings in a database, giving me a rich source of data for analyzing trends and, perhaps, identifying the cause for the increase.

Google Gemini has proven very capable at doing this sort of data analysis. I exported a CSV file of the electric meter readings to it, and asked:

This is a CSV of my electric meter readings from 2014 until the present. The relevant columns are datestamp, which contains the date and time, and reading, which is the reading on the electric meter. The readings need to be divided by 100 to get the value in kWh.

I’d like the following:

1. A chart and/or analysis showing when during the day we’re using electricity.
2. A chart showing the trend of daily usage over this period.
3. Any helpful conclusions about whether the gradual increase in consumption from 2014 to present is related to time of day.

It returned some very helpful analysis, including:

Your consumption remained remarkably consistent for the first seven years of this dataset.

2014–2021: You averaged approximately 13–16 kWh per day.

The 2023–2024 Surge: Starting in late 2023, your daily consumption began to climb rapidly. By 2024, your average daily usage reached 28.9 kWh, essentially doubling your historic baseline.

Recent Stability: 2025 and early 2026 show that this higher usage has become the “new normal,” maintaining an average of 23–28 kWh per day.

And:

Comparing the hourly profiles of 2015 vs. 2024/2025 yields a clear answer: The increase in consumption is occurring across all hours of the day, but the impact is most extreme during the evening and overnight.

Evening Intensification: In 2015, your evening peak (8:00 PM) was roughly 0.9 kWh per hour. In 2024/2025, that same peak jumped to nearly 2.0 kWh per hour. This suggests that whatever was added to the home (e.g., a heat pump, EV charging, or new appliances) is being used most heavily during the evening.

Rising Baseload: Your overnight usage (3:00 AM) was historically near-zero (approx. 0.4 kWh/hour). It has now roughly doubled to 0.8–0.9 kWh/hour. This indicates a “phantom load” or an appliance that runs 24/7 (like a heat pump in “maintain” mode or a new large refrigerator/server).

Conclusion: The increase isn’t just a shift in when you use power—it is a massive increase in volume across the board, with the evening peak now being much sharper and more expensive than it was a decade ago.

I followed up:

Is there any date that you can point to where the usage obviously goes up?

The reply to that question included a chart showing the daily usage increase very clearly:

And another chart focusing on the period from mid-August to mid-October:

Its commentary:

The “Smoking Gun”: September 5–10, 2023

While your usage had small fluctuations over the years, there is a dramatic and permanent “step up” that begins the first week of September 2023.

Before Sept 5, 2023: Your daily usage was consistently in the 12–18 kWh range.

After Sept 5, 2023: Your usage immediately spiked into the 35–45 kWh range and has never returned to its old baseline.

…

Since this shift happened in early September (during a period where roof heating wires wouldn’t be in use), and the consumption remained high through the winter and into the following summer, this points to a permanent addition to the household infrastructure.

I went spelunking through my photo archive to see if there was anything that might jog my memory about that time, and, sure enough, I found this receipt from Canadian Tire for a duhumidifier:

A look through my email from the same period confirms that I did, indeed, install the dehumidifier in our (very humid) basement the first week of September 2023.

A followup conversation with Gemini suggested that leaving this unit on 24/7 from that point on could consume as much as 11 kWh per day, which explains a significant chunk of the increase.

At the current cost of 17.3 cents/kWh, the dehumidifier costs us about $60 per month to run.

There are a few other smoking guns—heating wires on the back roof that don’t have a temperature-dependent controller, summertime air conditioning, a fan we run every night to bring fresh air into our bedroom—but it looks like the dehumidifier is the likely cause of the big jump.

As a companion to this video (linked to here), I calculated what it cost me to charge my 2016 Kia Soul EV electric car in 2025: the total was $267.07.

Here’s a summary of where that charging happened, and how much it cost:

Charging at Home

At home I charge the car with an EVDuty level 2 charger. The EVDuty app lets me export my charging session data as CSV files, which I then totalled in a spreadsheet.

• I charged the car at home 78 times.
• Charging used a total of 1,036 kWh of electricity.
• At the going rate of 17.23 cents per kWh, the cost for that electricity was $178.50.

Charging on the Go

Most of the time when I’m on the go I’m charging using level 2 or level 3 chargers that accept the Flo system’s card. The Flo website allows charging data to be exported as an Excel file.

• I charged the car at Flo stations 18 times.
• Charging used a total of 189 kWh of electricity.
• Total Flo charges were $88.58.

Flo chargers bill by time, not by kWh. The effective cost per kWh of my charging at Flo stations was 47 cents.

Otherwise

There are a few other places I can’t account for.

When we’re out by the shore, I charge the card overnight using a level 1 charger plugged into a regular household outlet; I don’t account for that electricity. 

And there were a few times I used free chargers, like the old Sun Country Highway ones, a few of which are still around. 

Combined, I probably charged like this about 10 times.

From this week’s University of Winds:

On Friday, an especially timely video from Technology Connections was published on YouTube: You are being misled about renewable energy technology. I downloaded and watched it on the train. I will watch it again later today.

I so very much want everyone who subscribes to this newsletter to watch this one-hour video because it communicates the best expression that I’ve come across that explains why solar power is both economically inevitable and the best choice for our renewable energy transition even with all the batteries that it will require.

Let me tell you how committed I am to sharing the message that we all must transition to renewable resources and electrify everything: my household took advantage of the last federal interest-free loans and installed solar panels on our garage – which went online this month! – for the non-insignificant cost equivalent of a kitchen remodeling job.

Watching the video is an excellent antidote to what you’ve just been through if you just watching two seasons of Landman. 

I created this to scratch my own itch, but others might find it useful to: you can now subscribe to a daily email summary of Prince Edward Island electricity load and generation.

If you subscribe, every morning just after midnight you’ll receive a summary of the previous day’s data that looks like this:

The “Peak Load” is the maximum amount of electricity required to power PEI on that day, in megawatts, and the time that peak was reached.

For each of the generation types—wind, solar, fossil, imported—I list the peak generation reached that day, and the percentage of the load that generation was meeting at the time of the peak.

Under the chart there’s a note about what percentage that day’s peak load was of the highest peak load ever.

This newsletter is an experiment; don’t build systems or practices that rely on it, as the experiment might not work or be maintained for the long term.

Oh, and if you’d prefer an RSS feed for the same summary, here it is.

Nikita Prokopov, in their People and Blogs interview from last week:

I don’t blog often, so it’s the worst: you come back to your blog once every few months, completely without context, and you need to spend hours just restoring it to the status quo.

I think of this as a kind “cognitive debt,” similar to the much-discussed variant that is said to accumulate from using AI assistants.

Like Prokopov, I experience this with things I do seldom, like filing income tax returns. Today, for example, I filed a T5 for my corporation (a report of divident payments), something I only need to do once a year. This required:

• Getting a summary of dividents from my financial advisor.
• Finding the place on the Canada Revenue Agency website where I can file a T5 (it’s cleverly hidden in a small button at the bottom of the screen that shows previous filings).
• Looking up my credit union’s transit number.
• Looking up what the various boxes on the return mean in human-style language, boxes like “Actual Amount of Dividends” and “Taxable amount of dividends other than eligible dividends.”
• Looking up the percentages that apply from box to box (the web form doesn’t calculate these for some reason).
• Submitting the form.

It’s not that any of these steps is overly complicated, it’s just that I need to relearn it every year. And because it’s not intuitive, and I tromp through the process with a “I just want to get this done” attitude, I don’t retain any useful information to carry through to next year.

The same mechanism applies when I go to do my company bookkeeping: for complex historical reasons, I maintain the books in AccountEdge for Windows, running in an emulator on my Mac Mini, through screen sharing from my MacBook Air. So every year I need to remember all the various technical bits that go together to make this work, then remember how AccountEdge works, and how to download and import bank statements, and so on.

The greatest appearance of cognitive debt was back in the days when I was trying my hand as a mobile app developer for both iOS and Android, developing apps in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, then wrapping them together as “app store” apps and submitting them through the respective Apple and Google systems for listing and selling apps.

The number of hoops this required, and that the hoops changed entirely on a regular basis, made the entire process a frustrating morass molasses-wading. And because I generally only updated apps on a yearly basis, I had to learn it all anew every year.

I suppose the opposite of “cogitive debt” is “cognitive investment,” which you might also simply call “learning.”

While some might be “read, plan, execute” learners, my cognitive investment strategy is more “bash my head against the wall, reflect, repeat.” 

Try something, see what works, see what doesn’t, adjust (talk to people, build a jig, walk away). 

Go at it again. 

Repeat. 

The neural pathways this practice builds are strong and long-lasting. 

It’s why I can make waffles without a recipe, have figured out how wet cornflour should be to make good tortillas, know what the arcane keystrokes needed to use vi are, can drive a car, do an unbroken set of 50 single-unders in the gym, make a solid martini, and tie my shoes.

Ton points to news that Vimeo has layed off most of its staff. 

I wasn’t sure that I had kept local copies of everything I’d uploaded to Vimeo over the years, so I cobbled together a way to download everything from the command line on my Mac. What follows presupposes that you have Homebrew already installed.

First, install both yt-dlp and ffmpeg:

brew install yt-dlp
brew install ffmpeg

Next, make sure that your Terminal app has “full disk access”:

• Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access
• Toggle “Terminal” on.

In Safari, login to Vimeo, and note your username.

Then, from the command line:

yt-dlp \
 --cookies-from-browser safari \
 --merge-output-format mp4 \
 --cookies-from-browser safari \
 --download-archive downloaded.txt \
 -f bestvideo+bestaudio/best \
 https://vimeo.com/USERNAME/videos

(substitute your own Vimeo for USERNAME). 

If it works, you’ll see each of your videos downloading, as two separate streams, one for audio one for video, and then ffmpeg merging those into one file, which you should be able to play with Quicktime Player.

There was a promo in regular rotation on CTV many years ago for the morning show Canada AM that featured Ed Robertson from Barenaked Ladies responding to a question about whether the band regretted its name. His reply was along the lines of “if you’d called your show ‘Wake up Jerks!’ you’d probably regret it.”

In a similar vein, my work once saw me spending time with the parent of one of the members of the band Holy Fuck. Despite, or perhaps because, his job was one requiring an uncommon amount of propriety, I always got the sense that he took a devilish pride in the name his son’s band.

It’s hard not to think of these bands when I think of The Man The Myth The Meatslab, the musical sobriquet of Jamie Clarke. It’s a memorable name, no doubt, but it quite doesn’t roll off the tongue. I wonder if he regrets it.

Regardless, TMTMTM released Until The Comet Came this week, and, unwieldy name or no, it’s a tiny perfect 16 minutes of rollicking songs that I dare you to emerge from a listen to unhappy. 

I can’t exactly tell you why I love it so, but I do.

Lisa writes about Leona’s Fox, the varied edition of reduction prints she’s been working on this month and finished up yesterday:

For the past few weeks I have been picking away (well, carving away) a linoleum block to help a red fox emerge from it. And emerge he has, in a varied edition of ten prints.  He’s unmistakably a fox, and I am proud I saw this experiment through until the end.

I watched this print come together, watched as Lisa lost control of it, walked through the valley of unease, and brought it back. It’s a lovely print (for sale in our shop).

The East Pointers released Schoonertown last week, and it’s been on regular rotation here since.

Most of the tracks are familiar, having been titrated out to us to enjoy individually over the last year. There are some new ones, though, and Sea Spirit is by far and away my favourite.

It is by no means a classic East Pointers song; indeed, it stands quite apart from the rollicking good times of the rest of the album. 

More than anything, it evokes the music of The Gloaming (the Irish-American supergroup), music I first encountered in this brilliant piece of television a decade ago, music that seems both fresh and new and like it’s always existed, music that, in the right frame of mind, can induce tears.

Not surprising given the track’s provenance, as the band described to Spill:

The East Pointers managed to pay tribute to Koady with a song that he actually wrote. The song, “Sea Spirit” is a beautiful instrumental and it anchors the album, both in tone and location.

“We finished off the album with that,” said Chaisson. “It is actually an instrumental track that Koady wrote. He wrote that and we always had in our pocket as a band and not knowing what to do with it. I remember Koady writing it and we were going to write lyrics to it, and we never had a proper recording of Koady playing. So, Jake and I decided to sit down at the piano and the fiddle and have our take of it. Really, the ‘sea spirit’ title comes from Koady. We all love the sea, but Koady especially loved it and made his living on the sea as well. We thought it was an appropriate way to wrap up the album. There’s a lot of themes throughout the album, but “Sea Spirit” wraps it all up.”

“There’s an interesting moment recording that too,” added Charron, “I live right across from an elementary school and while we were recording it, the recess was on, and you couldn’t really hear it inside, and we thought, we should put a mic outside and capture some of this. It just felt that the timing was really nice because Koady had such a youthful energy too. There is melancholy to it, but a bit of hope. It turned out really nice.”

“There is melancholy to it, but a bit of hope.” That’s it, exactly.

November 16, 2005 was the day I first encountered Gordon Cobb, who died at age 61, just before Christmas. I know this because I sent an email to a friend, reflecting on Gordon’s taking the “no” side in a small debate about a plebiscite, then soon to be held, on proportional representation:

You once told me (and I paraphrase, but closely) that Ivan MacArthur and Gordon Cobb are the “two smartest political organizers on PEI.”

Last night I had my first meeting with Gordon Cobb, a small event
organized by Cynthia Dunsford at the Queen St. Commons structured as a “debate about the plebiscite.”

Gordon was representing the “no,” and the young fellow who’s head of the “yes” spoke to the affirmative.

Both speakers made a good case, and I came away more confused than not.

Before the session I was leaning “yes” quite strongly; Gordon’s
eloquence, and his well-rationed arguments have me leaning equally in both directions.

Inasmuch as I was, and remain, a fervant believer in proportional representation, that Gordon had me wavering was testament to his oratory, his intelligence, and his political smarts (my correspondent replied, in part, “Gordon is that he is without a doubt the most devastating debater I know of…”).

That was 20 years ago. Gordon and I were friends, of a type, since.

Not a close friendship—I never went to his house, he never came to mine; we never exchanged emails or texts; I have no photos of him, knew nothing of his personal life; we never met, indeed, outside of happenstance encounters —but a friendship nonetheless. 

More often than not we would end up chatting at Receiver Coffee on Victoria Row, and more often than not we would end up chatting about the broad political or cultural themes of the day.

Gordon was a determined thinker, with a reasoned, deliberate, systematic mind; he had a way of seeing the larger picture, understanding the players and their motivations, perceiving how the chess board might move forward. In conversation, he listened (an uncommon skill, especially for men of our generation).

In the month since he died I’ve come to realize that Gordon was knit into the fabric of Island life very deeply. The list of people who counted him as a friend is long; the list of people testifying to the depth and importance of their friendship with him longer than I could have imagined.

Last Thursday we went to The Trailside for an edition of the Jack Pine Folk Club dedicated to Gordon’s memory (before he died he was to have appeared in the guise of Milton Acorn). Poets read poems—their own, Gordon’s—songs were sung, glasses raised. 

Someone from away, landing in the middle of it, would think it an unusual gathering, in part because of the very nature of the “and now a few jigs, reels, and hornpipes,” but, more so, because, as Gordon himself wasn’t there, they’d encounter only the shadow he cast, and be left wondering about the strength of one person’s imprint on such a motley collection of people.

James Baldwin wrote this in 1955, reckoning with life in Paris:

One had, in short, to come into contact with an alien culture in order to understand that a culture was not a community basket-weaving project, nor yet an act of God; was something neither desirable nor undesirable in itself, being inevitable, being nothing more or less than the recorded and visible effects on a body of people of the vicissitudes with which they had been forced to deal. And their great men are revealed as simply another of these vicissitudes, even if, quite against their will, the brief battle of their great men with them has left them richer.

Surely, in that light, Gordon was a “great man.” In thousands of conversations, scores of appearances on stage, prose and poetry, political machinations in the back room and out front, he made a mark. On Prince Edward Island. On all of us.