Author: Julian Champkin
My wife and I have a disagreement. she says that leaving a low-energy light on all night in the kitchen so that the cats can see is not extravagant. I say a) that sleeping cats cover their eyes with their paw to keep the light out which shows that they don’t actually want the light on; b) that cats can see in the dark anyway; and c) that even if they couldn’t it would still be extravagant on the grounds that they don’t usually spend the night in their baskets in the kitchen at all but on our bed and they have shown themselves quite capable of climbing the stairs in the dark to find it. my wife on the other hand keeps turning off the light in the hall to save money, and since in the evenings I pass through the hall roughly once every ten minutes I find this unnecessary.
A Home Energy Monitor -
will it save energy, and money,
and bring harmony to the home?
Meanwhile, neither of us bother to turn the TV off standby, which for all I know used more electricity in 24 hours than any amount of juggling with lights.
Thanks to technology all these marital disputes may soon be a thing of the past. for Christmas I bought my wife (among other things of course – I am not that obsessive) a little electronic gadget that monitors your power use. It cost about £30. (On opening it she told me that I could have got it for free from the power company; I pass on that hint for nothing…). one part of it clips onto the main incoming electricity cable, and relays what it senses to the display part, which you can carry around. I have just got around to installing it. I am hoping it will provide us both with a lesson in valuable statistics.
I turned the thing on for the first time twenty minutes ago. as I write this – it is morning, and the cats are out and all lights are off – it is telling me that my household is consuming 1.69kW of electrical energy, which is an awful lot and horrified and baffled me at first because all I have on is the laptop, fridge, freezer, and TV standby. Then the toaster clicked off and consumption went down to 0.11 kW. I had forgotten the toaster, and the toast (which was burnt). clearly my toaster takes 1.58 kW – the equivalent of a one-bar electric fire and a half.
The gizmo displays Costs and CO2 emissions as well as kilowatts. I have now timed my second slice of toast. It took 2 minutes to the just-burnt stage, at 18 pence-worth of electricity an hour, which works out at 0.6 pence per slice of toast or 1.2 pence cooking-expenses for my two-slice breakfast, excluding the pot of tea. (I’ll analyse the electric kettle another day.)
The almost-irreducible combination of laptop, fridge, freezer and unnecessary TV standby above is costing me one penny an hour – 24 pence a day, £7.44 a month. but the washing machine, dryer, TV-when-in-use, and so on will be heavy if non-continuous users. the book that comes with the gizmo says we spend on average 10% of our electricity bills on lighting. of course the big killers would be heating and cooking, but we use gas for the cooking and a woodstove for most of our heating, and the gadget will measure neither of those. Knowledge ought to be power – or at least power-saving. if we know where the energy, and the money, are being wasted we can presumably make not-too-uncomfortable adjustments to our lifestyle to save a bit of both. the book also claims that ‘targets of between 10% and 20% reduction in electricity use can be achieved by understanding how we use energy’ and has the come-on ‘Achieve savings of up to 20%’ – note the happy use of ‘up to’ which makes this latter claim fairly meaningless.
A degree lower on the thermostat, or half an hour less of heating time, may well make a significant difference to overall consumption and bills but I suspect that in a house which doesn’t use electricity for heating rooms or water the opportunities for saving are in practice considerably less – but I will be letting you know from time to time the fruits of my own monitoring.
At the moment it is claiming that my average electricity costs are 21 pence a day – the fridge or freezer must have cut out for a bit since three paragraphs above. but so far I have had it running for an hour, and an hours-worth of accumulated data is not enough to go on. the average daily consumption that the gizmo displays will become more accurate with every passing day, as it gathers ever-more data to work on.
It is reassuring in a way. Toast at just over half a penny a slice is affordable. It means I won’t have to insist that the children eat their breakfast bread untoasted in future. but the device may inspire other life-style changes. They will doubtless be made in marital harmony since they will be evidence-based. and if they leave the cats in the dark at night – well, I don’t suppose the animals will leave home over it.