Unplug Research: Usage of electricity

The research done by previous cycles also included questions about what the people in Mindanao use electricity for, how much they pay for electricity per month and if their electricity bill correlates with their income. This post is about presenting the output of this part of the survey.

Payment for electricity and correlation between electricity bill and income

 The following graph shows the correlation between the income of a household and the spending on electricity. As expected people with the lowest income spend the least on electricity. At the same time people with more money tend to spend more money on electricity. The previous cycles linked the reason for this to the increasing number of electronic devices in richer households. The reason for the results of the ">50000 pesos per month" bracket is that there were only few people earning that much in the surveyed puroks.

 

 When it came to the question if electricity was considered expensive all of the surveyed puroks showed the same picture. The following diagram shows the answers for a representative purok.

  Even though those are the results for purok 2 of the Mintal barangay other puroks had an similar outcome. In average around 85 to 90% of the questioned people would agree or strongly agree with the statement "Electricity is Expensive". This is a very interesting result due to the fact that electricity rates in Mindanao are the cheapest in the whole Philippines. While people need to pay as much as 16 p/kWh in Luzon and other places, people in Mindanao only pay as much as 2,9 p/kWh. This shows that people living in the surveyed puroks weren't informed about the general situation of energy in Mindanao or the Philippines at all.

Electricity Usage

To find out if there are any potentials in saving electricity regarding the usage of electronic devices the previous cycles included questions about what the people used electricity for into their surveys. They asked about usage of light, air conditioning, fans, fridges and other devices such as TVs and computers of laptops. Many of the households use light more than 5 hours a day but there are also some that don't use light at all. Air conditioners, which usually consume a lot of electricity weren't as common as the electricity saving alternative: the fan. Again there are people not even using a fan but the majority used fans between 3-5 or more than 5 hours a day.

When it comes to other devices, many of the surveyed people used TVs and if they did, it was usually for a longer amount of time during the day. Here is the question if the people really watched television for that time or if it was just running while they did something else. Electricity consumption for television could be reduced a lot if people would only turn it on when they really used it. While many households had at least one TV, only few owned computers or laptops and usage was usually not as much as for the television. Also the radio was not that common and only used by a few people for more than 5 hours a day.

One of the biggest electricity consumer in households is the fridge. How many people owned a fridge varied from purok to purok. While in some only few more than 50% owned a fridge, up to 75% owned a fridge in other puroks. Unfortunately most of the households were owners of comparably old fridges that need a lot more electricity than newer and more efficient ones. Around half of the people would use the medium level of cooling temperatur while only few would use the high level. The rest claimed to use the least electricity consuming low level.

From the reports: "Energy conservation and the Liter of Light projects in Puroks 2 and 10 of Mintal Barangay", "Energy situation and energy conservation in Davao City, Barangay 28-C", "Research Paper Cycle 3", "Small effort big change: Energy crisis and energy saving in Mintal"