A way to save up to 25% on your Electricity Bills?

Every so often Lidl sell a 13A "Energy Monitor" for £4.99, which shows you the electricity usage from the device plugged into its 13A socket every few seconds, and sums these over time periods. It will even tell you the cost, given your unit cost of electricity.

Others of similar type are available (e.g. from Maplin Electronics -- "on offer" at only five times the Lidl price...).

As you say, common sense is cheaper.

Mchardy - first off, refreshing change for someone to declare an interest - thanks for that.

It looks like the difference between your product and the Lidl/Maplin monitors is that the electrisave 'plugs into' the mains feed rather than individual sockets, so is useful for 'hard wired' appliances (shower, cooker, lights etc).

However, you may have a tough time on here as most of us are hardened skinflints.! Would have been useful for the TV show last night though - good marketing point to get in touch with some of the TV money management shows? (you can pay me if it works...).

My father’s electricity supplier is Scottish and Southern Electricity. About a week ago, totally out of the blue he was sent a “Current Cost Monitor”, which is the daddy of all monitors, free of charge.

http://www.scottish-southern.co.uk/SSEInternet/index.aspx?id=8226&rightColHeader=124

I really want one so I emailed them and got this reply…

My Message:

You recently sent my father a current cost monitor, I borrowed it and it's great. How do I go about getting one? I'm not a SSE customer though - I could always switch!!

Their Reply:

Thank you for your enquiry about Current Cost Monitors. Unfortunately as an Energy Supplier we do not have any facility for the retail sale of these monitors. SSE is working together with the Government to achieve Energy Efficiency Commitment targets. This could mean in the future that these monitors may be more widely available to our customers.
However if you wish to purchase one now we are only aware of one company that offers it direct. This company is called Electrisave or you can search Amazon or Ebay or Maplin.

Not sure if I switched that I’d get one though.

Well I must admit that it is nice to see someone declaring an interest.

That said I think the advertising of Electrisave is a disgrace. "Save up to 25% on your electricity bill - its easy with the award winning Electrisave"

The first thing to point out that neither the electrisave or any other device will save you anything at all - let alone 25%.

It is the same as stating that the computer on my car that displays fuel consumption saves me 25% of the petrol used.

I understand that the Advertising Standards Authority(ASA) have no jurisdiction over adverts on the internet. Perhaps 'mchardy' could tell us if they make that claim in other media? If they do I would certainly test it with the ASA.

In moneysaving terms, the Electrisave is a waste of money and the simple 'energy monitor' mentioned above or 'power measuring meter' sold for a few pounds is of far more use to householders.

This has been covered many times on this forum.

Nearly all the devices that consume the major amount of electricity(Fridge, freezer, washing machine, dishwasher, cooker, iron, fan heater etc etc etc) are thermostatically controlled, or have variable power usage, so the Electrisave has no way of telling you how much electricity they use, except instantaneously and not over a period of time.

To give but one example. Take your freezer which when the compressor is running uses, say, 500 Watts(0.5kW or half a unit) - a high figure but it makes the arithmetic easy.

Switch off your freezer for a moment to check what power it takes(and cost to run)and the probability is that the electrisave will register no change at all. That is because most of the time the freezer is using no electricity at all. This is because the compressor runs only for a small period of time.

However if you happen to switch your freezer off(momentarily to check) and catch it during the short period of time when the compressor is running it will indicate that you are saving 5pence an hour.(set to 10p/kWh) Well you could deduce then that your freezer costs £36 a month to run.(or nothing) How do you know the cost of running your freezer? - You simply have no idea with the electrisave.

Plugging the freezer into a cheap £6 device and leave for a while(a day or two) and it will measure the exact cumulative consumption and cost which is probably in the region of £4 a month.

Take your washing machine. When the heater is on the electrisave will show it uses 30p an hour. If your machine runs for 1.5 hours you might deduce that it costs 45p for the cycle, the probability is that it uses less than 10p.

Put on everything on your cooker and you will have the electrisave telling you that it costs, say, £1.50 an hour. As everything(ovens/plates etc) are on a thermostat(and continually switch on and off) your consumption varies between zero and £1.50 and the electrisave has no idea how much it costs.

So the only thing that electrisave works for is something with a fixed consumption like light bulbs and you don't need to be an electrical engineer to work out that cost.

So as this is a money saving site it surely must good advice to tell people not to waste their money on a device like the Electrisave(costing £59 to £80) when a simple £6 or so device is much much more effective in showing power consumption and hence savings.

Care to debate this Mr Operations Director?

mchardy wrote: »

Have a look at this link - a real life user of the electrisave has posted this.


www.ukshout.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=6358

Like all of these gadgets, the link doesn't seem to work !