Tyler Danke's Personal Blog

In our effort to be Christian stewards and win financially we are on Time of Use Electricity. WE Energy has a plan that you save money by using your electricity at night instead of during the day. In our area electricity is normally about 13 cents per kilowatt.

In September 2010 we signed up for Time of use level 1 which means during the day from 7am to 7pm electricity is 19 cents per kilowatt. During the night it is 9 cents per kilowatt. The time of use only applies Monday through Friday. Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays are automatically 9 cents per kilowatt. We have delayed the use of the water heater and dryer during the day and save that mostly for nights and weekends.

Electricity is more expensive to produce for the power companies during the day because all of the businesses are using large amounts of electricity during the day. The more electricity that is being used at one time the more expensive it is for them to add more power generation.

This project did save us some money in the last year but if memory serves me right it was only like $150.00 If we would have used level 2 electricity we would have saved much more than that so we are now enrolled in level two for Time of Use.

Level 2 is 5 cents per kilowatt during the day and 25 cents per kilowatt during the night. I can’t wait to see the savings over the next year!

Alltel was bought out by Verizon. Then we became alltel customers again somehow. Alltel had to send us new phones that were lower quality than the ones we had with Verizon. Then Element Mobile became the cell phone provider for the alltel customers in our area. When Element Mobile we were constantly missing phone calls. All mobile Internet customer were not getting any Internet no text messages were being sent or received and this was happening for months / weeks. it started in January.

We went into the store. there was not a single phone in the building. There was a 2 hour wait in line to get a rep that could tell us nothing other than they will get phones that work eventually. and that if we left there would be early termination fees on all lines. $200.00 per phone. my family had 5 phones. Call their 800 number I waited for 45 minutes on one occasion and 90 minutes on another occasion and nobody answered their phones. this was supposed to be 24/7 customer service.

we went to us cellular they said that you have to transfer cell phone providers between 9am and 5 pm Monday through Friday because there is only one person doing the number porting.  we did that. risking a $1,000 in early term fees because we were missing calls, etc… they sent us a bill for the early term fees. I called again waited 30 minutes on the phone and someone answered. they said we had to go into the local office. The local office said we had to drive 60 miles to the corporate office. My mom drove to the corporate office. While there the guy at the front door asked what she wanted. She got a piece of paper with TONS of codes on it that were not understandable by a customer. Obviously this entire form was for internal usage. But my mom was instructed to send it in anyway.

I called the 800 number asking for help with the form. Basically he said he could not help me with it and that it is something that the customer needs to fill out. I called again and was told that the form was a waste of my time and we wouldn’t get the early term fees waived. I gave up and told my dad just not to pay the early term fees. My dad called them and they waived all of the early term fees and said that we owed $36.00. it is much worse than this actually. This is just half of it. but its enough for today.

My office and our bedroom is currently the same room. When we bought this house in May I got my own office for the first time! A room all to myself! I loved it. Our bedrooms were upstairs and the office was downstairs. The house does not have a furnace, just a gas space heater in the dining room on the first floor. We could have decided to put space heaters in the bedrooms but instead decided we would economize for this first year and move downstairs so that we would not have to heat the upstairs. This however means I no longer have a room just for my office. It also serves as our bedroom.

Right now my least favorite part about it is that when I get up early in the morning to start work, I cannot turn the light on. Ruth is still sleeping so I cannot turn the light on because I would wake her. I have papers on my desk that I would like to be taking care of but cannot right now because it is dark in here. Once the day starts going I get involved with other projects and do not feel as though I have time to work on the mess of papers.

Goals
Be a doer and not just a thinker. I have all day at work to be thinking. I need to actually carry out my thoughts.

Be trustworthy. Not procrastinate. My daily list of things that need to be done every day be done every day.

Give value to Ruth’s thoughts and feelings. Focus on improving myself not on Ruth. I want to have time together so that we can have time to share our thoughts and feelings. I think I will start sleeping 7 hours a day instead of 8 so that we have 3 hours together at night. Ruth has been writing her thoughts, feelings and beliefs so they would be viewed as more “true”. Possibly writing to eachother is a good thing. Ruth feels as though she does not have the energy to job search or find a job that pays better.

Be able to converse not just about my business with Ruth. Come up with other conversation topics and interests that we share. As a couple we need to find something else that we enjoy. We do enjoy gardening and cooking but did not fulfill our desire to do that this summer because our home renovations.