Meralco offers online energy-saving tool

MANILA, Philippines – For budget-conscious power consumers, the Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) offers a handy – and free – tool to help them manage their electricity consumption better.

Known as the Meralco Appliance Calculator (MAC), this computer application can be accessed by any consumer from Meralco’s official website at www.meralco.com.ph. Described as “My electricity budget buddy,” the MAC is being offered by the power utility as an electricity bill management tool to help its customers better manage their electric consumption and, hence, their electric bill, make wiser decisions in buying home appliances, and learn home energy efficiency tips that are customized to their household’s power consumption.

MAC has been available since 2003, and Meralco has been constantly adding new features and enhancements to it so that it could meet the growing and changing demands of electricity users.

The new edition of MAC offers users with the option of using either its “My Appliance Calculator” or “My Bill Manager” function.

The “My Appliance Calculator” function allows a user to calculate the estimated consumption cost of appliances – one at a time.

The “My Bill Manager” facility, on the other hand, allows the user to calculate the estimated consumption cost of appliances in a table format. It enables the user to get an estimate of the household’s total electric consumption cost and see which appliances consume more electricity.

Other features of the “My Bill Manager” menu include: consumption manager, energy efficiency adviser and target bill amount estimator.

The consumption manager allows the user to see a corresponding electric consumption pie chart and some text description of the chart based on the information provided by the user.

The energy efficiency adviser, meanwhile, allows the user to see some energy efficiency tips based on the user’s electricity consumption pattern.

The target bill amount estimator allows the user to see an estimate of his or her “monthly target kilowatt-hour (kWh) consumption” and “estimated price per kWh” by just inputting the “target electric bill amount.”

Other new features of the MAC allow the user to share the MAC website link through email and social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, send feedback to Meralco regarding the MAC application, print the computation results for easy access and future reference, and view the basis for computations so that users can validate the MAC results.

Easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions for using these various features are also found in Meralco’s official website www.meralco.com.ph.–(The Philippine Star)