Get your granny to read it before you distribute it

I have spend a day trying to understand an electricity bill. There is online help called “how to understand your electricity bill”. It is a good example of how not to provide help, and people should learn from this.

When your write documents, get someone else outside of your area to review the document and make sure the documents are useful. My father was great, when I was eleven years old I had to write down how to make a pot of tea. My father would point out I had not checked/put any water in the kettle etc.

Some of the problems I found with the electricity bill help information were:

• A PDF file showing the bill and help information, this had been created from a web page. I searched for a word, it was found but not displayed! In the PDF document it was white text on a white background – and so was invisible. If you copied the page to the clipboard and pasted it into a document, the text was visible.
• In the pdf document, the instructions “move your mouse over the line to get more information” only applied to the web page, not the pdf page, but it was displayed in the pdf.
• In the web page “how to understand your electricity bill” it gave an example bill, with a pop-up beside each line of interest. I thought this would be useful – but no. On the topic “Agreed Availability Charge”, the pop up said “Agreed Availability Charge”. Great – this adds no value, and does not explain, nor give me a link to what the Agreed Availability Charge actually is.
• In the “Power information summary” section, it gives values like HH, MD, RE REAP, and only explains some of them. REAP is “reactive power”, what is this? I guess HH is Half Hourly readings. (Reactive power represents the electrical power that flows back and forth between the phase conductors and the neutral conductor of a three-phase network, but does not perform any mechanical work – this didn’t help me either.)
• There is a helpful(?) video of someone who said to reduce the cost of your electricity, consider reducing the the availability cap/limit. Our value is 69, but does not give any units, nor how to compare it with you current usage.

The moral of this story is – get someone who is not an expert to try out your information.