Meralco Appliance Calculator Archives

I still remember the days of old when I was growing up. Whenever we had a power outage in our area, it was a challenge to reach Meralco. Phone lines were jammed all the time. We had to tune in to radio stations via our portable radio to find out what areas were affected and how soon power would be restored. No one had any idea if their area would be affected by maintenance of power lines. Basically, Meralco customers were pretty much in the dark (pun intended).

A new Meralco, however, has been emerging from its corporate shell. Going beyond its official website which was then a one-way, company-to-customers information dissemination tool, it began engaging the public on social media by creating a Twitter account (@meralco) and a Facebook page. Suddenly, access to Meralco widened beyond the capacity of phone lines as maintenance schedules were posted online and inquiries from customers were answered more rapidly.

In continuing plans to better inform the public and to improve public service, Meralco has revamped its website to make it more responsive to the public’s needs.

Homepage

When you land on its homepage, it gives you two different portals. FOR CUSTOMERS provides answers to customers’ concerns including electricity consumption, bill-related matters and new account applications. THE COMPANY is where you find corporate information like annual reports, business partnerships, stakeholder relations and investor information.

Since most of us are consumers, I’ll focus on the FOR CUSTOMERS portal. Here’s what you get when you choose that option.

The navigation bar on the topmost part lists the website’s main sections. At the bottom are links to frequently accessed information. The Quick Links on left sidebar provide more detailed information for customers and the center area is reserved for the most recent videos, photos and articles for customers to know.

The Meralco Appliance Calculator (AppCal for short), which is a link under Quick Links, brings you to a web application where customers can compute and gauge their electricity consumption based on the different appliances they use at home. Computations can be specific to the type of appliance, corresponding wattage, and frequency of usage. The AppCal calculates cost per hour, day, week, and month. The AppCal also takes into account the prevailing generation charge for the month.

For those with smartphones and tablets, AppCal is now a FREE downloadable app. I’ve downloaded it on my ipad.

Meralco is setting up more innovative plans, one of which is offering prepaid electricity, much like a mobile phone’s prepaid load feature. Their other innovation plans can be read in my post HERE.

Find Meralco in these digital areas:

Website: meralco.com.ph

Twitter: twitter.com/meralco

Facebook: www.facebook.com/meralco

YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/meralcoph

Having friends in Meralco is a boon. For years now, these friends have given our family advice on many things, including the type of appliances to buy so we use electricity efficiently. My friend Alex would even hand out Meralco brochures that give friendly consumer advice on how to save on energy costs. And I remember instances in friends’ houses when Alex would spend time explaining to us the impact of how we use our appliances on our bills.

Being web-~~addicted~~ connected, I long discovered M.A.C. (Meralco Appliance Calculator) on the Meralco website. In fact, the MAC (I’ve removed the periods just to make it easier as I type this post) has been on their website since 2003. Unfortunately, not many consumers knew about the existence of MAC. And honestly, while I did tinker around with MAC a bit, trying to put in some info on our appliances and usage patterns, I never really got to use it as a real tool for electricity savings.

Till now.

Meralco is relaunching M.A.C. with new and improved features so that it can really become your electricity budget buddy. Let’s meet M.A.C. –

Fig. 1 Portal to MAC

The image you see in Fig. 1 is the first thing you see when you click the MAC link on the Meralco homepage. Before you can use MAC, you need to click on “Agreement” and clicking “I Agree” after reading the terms. The new feature on this portal is the “Formula” link. According to Meralco, they got a lot of feedback from the older MAC version as to how the energy costs were computed so they decided to add this link to the formulas.

When you choose My Appliance Calculator, you get this screen:

Fig. 2 Home screen of MAC

Tabs run across the top (General Appliances, Aircon, Ref, etc.) Clicking on those tabs bring dropdown menus to further narrow down your type of appliance. The average wattage of this appliance is filled out automatically. Put in the number of hours, days and weeks the appliance is used and MAC will calculate for you how much that appliance contributes to your bill per day/week/month. Of course, these are all rough estimates. Wattage can change depending on the brand and model of the appliance. But this gives you an initial feel already which are the energy guzzlers in your home.

Another innovation to MAC is My Bill Manager which allows you to estimate your monthly electric bill by filling up a table. You can even see which appliances consume more electricity. Just enter all the appliances and types of lights you have at home, your usage (hours, days, weeks used). You have the option to change the wattage although an estimate is automatically provided.

Fig. 3 My Bill Manager

Click on Fig. 3 to get a bigger image. I put in an example – one aircon, 1.0 horsepower, running 9 hours daily for a month. Imagine, that appliance alone costs you over P2,300 per month! Yikes!

Fill out as much as you can and you will see monthly estimates of your electric bill adding up.

At the bottom of the spreadsheet are 3 other features. Consumption Manager gives you the top 6 appliances that contribute to your electric bill, in pesos and percentage and presents these in pie chart form.

Fig. 4 Consumption Manager

Energy Efficiency Adviser gives you handy tips to save energy consumption.

Fig. 5 Energy Efficiency Adviser

Target Bill Amount Estimator lets you set your desired target bill amount, then it tells you just how many kilowatt hours you should consume to stay within that target amount.

Fig. 6 Target Bill Amount Estimator

And when you’re done, you can even share your results via email, Facebook or Twitter or select the Print button (see Fig. 4). And the Feedback button allows you to email Meralco with suggestions as well.