Hey frugal friends! It's Stephanie from SixFiguresUnder.com. Saving money by
saving electricity is a no-brainer-- you use less electricity, you save more money--
but EARNING money from saving electricity takes it a step further and
it is awesome! It's September now. Last month in August we earned over $90
from reducing our electricity usage a couple nights a week for the
whole month. Now if you've been following our transparent budget updates every
month, you've heard me talk about the OhmConnect program. I've been promising to
give you the whole scoop for months now and back in June I even recorded the
whole a whole screen share showing you the the dashboard and everything but I
didn't get this intro video done so I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the
program and then I'll show you the screen share video that I made so you
can see what the dashboard looks like see how earning money with OhmConnect
works. Let me tell you how OhmConnect works. OhmConnect is a free program that
is open to households who are willing to proactively reduce their electricity
usage during a couple of hours each week. So I usually get a text maybe one to
three times a week that tells me when the next OhmHour is. So I could get a
text today saying that tomorrow from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. there is an OhmHour and
they also give me a forecast. They tell me how much electricity the electric
company is expecting me to use. Electric companies like to forecast how much
their customers are going to use so that they know what power plants they need to
activate in order to meet the electric demands of all their customers. So during
peak hours, you know when people are getting home from work they're cooking
their dinner, they're doing their laundry, they're turning on the air-conditioning,
when a lot of electricity is being used that's when OhmHours usually happen
because the idea is that they want to prevent the big dirty power plants from
turning on. Not only are they bad, really bad for the environment, they're also really
expensive to run. So OhmConnect gets all of its hundreds of thousands of users to
decide okay during this hour we are going to use less than our forecasted
amount so that the electric company doesn't need to turn on the big dirty
power plants that are expensive and so they are saving money and passing that
savings on to us. The way the forecast is calculated is they take the last 10 days
If it's on a week night, they take the last 10 weekdays
at that same period, so if the ohm hour is going to be from 6 to 7 they look at
the previous10 weekdays during the hours of 6 & 7 and find the average
of what you use then and that is your forecast. For weekends they look at the
last four weekend days at that same hour to forecast what you're going to be-- what
you usually use-- so your forecast comes in kilowatt hours. So they may say. "ok
tomorrow for the ohm hour that's from 6 to 7 you need to use, your forecast is
2.3 kilowatt hours. So in order to win the ohm hour I need to use less than 2.3
kilowatt hours during that 6:00 to 7:00 time period. If I use less
than that then I win the OhmJour and I'll get points which translate into
money. And the more I reduce my usage from that forecast, the more points I get.
So the less energy you use, the more points you get. Now what if you go over
your forecast? what if you use more electricity than they are expecting? You
will lose points. The thing is, you are able to opt out of OhmHours. If, you know,
we've had some OhmHours where we already have company scheduled to come
over and for whatever reason we could not meet the ohm hour, so you can opt out
if you opt out you won't lose points, but the default is that you will be
participating. So in just a second I'll show you the screen share video that I
made that goes inside my dashboard and shows you how we earn points and
walks you through all of that, but first I want to tell you how you can start
earning money. So to get started you can just go to OhmConnevt. If you go to
SixFiguresUnder.com/OhmConnect
I'll put the link down in the description. When you first get there and
they'll ask for your zip code they want to they'll try to guess what your
electricity provider is based on your zip code. You'll have a chance to change
that later if they don't guess right. You'll put in your email address and
create a password. After you verify your email address they will want you to
connect your utility company with them. Now the process at first seemed a
little intimidating to me. They send you a document, an online document
that you need to to sign online so that they have permission to access your
utility history and and usage so that they can know what your forecast is and
know how much you are using so they know how much you've reduced your usage . Since
the utilities are in my husband's name, I forwarded the document on to him.
Plus he's an attorney, so you know reading documents like that is his thing.
So i had him he read it. He signed it electronically, submitted it, it
was simple. Once you submit the electronic signature to connect
OhmConnect with your utility company, wait a couple days and you'll be connected and
then you will start being able to earn through OhmHours. Okay let me show you
that screen share so you can see all the nitty-gritty of how unconnect works.
So let me just jump in here and show you how the OhmConnect dashboard looks.
Right here it shows our past performance in ohm hours, shows the the date and the
time and then the gray column shows what our forecast was and the blue column
shows what we actually used. So depending on the difference between the gray and
the blue, that's where the the points come in. So this this OhmHour we're really
close. We barely came under in under our forecast so we
only got 52 points, but others we get a lot a bigger difference and we get more
points. So this was a mega OhmHour. In the summer they have several, once a week
I think, they do a Mega OhmHour which has the normal forecast and then a
really challenging goal forecast and if you meet your your challenge goal then
you get an extra bonus. :et me click on this and you can see the details. So the
mega bonus for reaching our our goal forecasts, let's see okay, so the mega
goal here is 1.284 kilowatts per hour
kilowatt hours I mean. This is our regular forecast right here and this is
how much we use so we used less than the mega goal. So we reached our mega goal
and we got that that extra bonus that's a 500 point or $5
bonus. This gold status is if you, in the last the average of the last 20 ohm
hours, if you've saved 15% you reach gold status and that gives you another 50% so
1.5 times the normal OhmHour points and then if you are platinum status
that means you in their last 20 ohm hours you've saved 40% or more. So right
now we're at platinum but during this ohm hour we were at gold and so we got
the extra 50%. For platinum you get 2 times the normal amount. And this streak
of 12 here that means the last 12 ohm hours we have won. By winning I mean
we got below our forecast. As your streak builds your bonus increases I think it's
5% with each one and so we get an additional 55% of our normal OhmHpur
points so. And this this buddy thing that's that's another way to earn points
if you and your buddy-- mone's someone I don't even know-- win that OhmHour
you get a bonus. It can't ever hurt you but sometimes you get bonus points
from your buddy. Anyway so for this OhmHour
we got 1388 points which is $13.88
I should also mention that this was a double OhmHour. This is a
two-hour time frame from 6 to 8. Normally they're just one hour. Let's see
here's a mega OhmHour that was just one hour and you see there's our bonus for
reaching getting below the the mega goal. What we did, we actually flipped our
breaker during that time which is why we were able to reduce it so low. And then a
gold status bonus, our streak bonusm buddy bonus, and so that our we earned
$8.82. So if you look at the month of June, let's see, we earned a
$1.14, $2.65 t, 52 cents, $13.88, $3.82
97 cents, $8.82 so that that adds up to like$31 or
something and we've still got more days in the month. So that $31 doesn't
include any referral credits it doesn't include any reimbursements like
sometimes you can get the smart plugs and they'll they'll
reimburse you for it. Okay let me show you the rest of the dashboard here. Down
here it shows your your total. So right now we have $43.70 that
I can cash out. These tokens you can do prizes or you know a streak guard so
that if you if you lose an OhmHour it doesn't mess up your streak or different
things. I don't do a whole lot with tokens.
This shows that we're at platinum. It shows the difference in how much we've
reduced our usage in the last 2000 hours so right now we're at 44% which means we
qualify for platinum and we get two times
two times the regular OhmHour points. Right now we're at 15 and so are our
bonus is an additional 75% this is as long of a record as we've made it. This
is something that's going on in the summer. They have a summer time drawing
where if you reach your mega OhmHour goal then you get entered and once you do
that three times and you get entered in the grand prize thing but I'm not
expecting to win but if I do I won't say no. Well that's the OhmConnect dashboard.
I'm happy to answer any questions you have about the program, about how it
works, what we do in the OhmHours. I'll leave some links down below to this
program and to my blog post about it and let me know if you have any questions!
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