energy usage

madrob_2

martin spoke on radio 2 of a gadget you can fit to meter that tells you cost of energy used at any 1 time any ideas of where to get it from

Magentasue

I have and would recommend this one:

https://www.ecogadgetshop.co.uk/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductCode=Current%20Cost%20Device%20(TEST)&Category=1

There are others (Owl, Efergy, Eco-eye) - google 'energy monitor' to find them all. As well as price, you might want to look at how much data they store.

Charis

I got one free from my electricity company, Southern Electric, for joining their 'Better Plan' scheme. Said to be worth £45, After two weeks of use we barely even register it is there. Apart from when the bright blue light comes on for random periods, for no reason, after dark and the high pitched whistle you can faintly hear coming from it.

The display changes every ten seconds, so as fast as you see what electricity is costing you per day, week, month, it changes. There is no cumulative total. Also as appliances are switched on and off the thing fluctuates wildly. Ironing yesterday, when the red light on the iron was on I was spending "£55 a month" when the light went out I was spending "£2.50 a month" What does that tell me? That the iron uses a lot of electricity, but only when the soleplate is hotting up, not all the time. Doh! I think I could have worked that out. Put three sixty watt light bulbs on and the thing registers...60W.

So far I have gathered that the shower, the kettle, the oven and the iron use a lot of leccy. Nothing new there, then. However, things that are on 24/7 but use a little at a time may well guzzle quite a lot of power. You won't be aware of it, though because your little meter will tell you that you are using £2.50 worth a month.

So far the only time it gets close to the actual amount I have to pay is when a large appliance is on, which is probably about 5% of the time, if that.

In a nutshell, don't pay for one of these gadgets. Get one that tells you how much an individual appliance is using and do the maths yourself. Don't know how you would work out how much a 60w light bulb really uses though, nor a compact one, come to that.

PS just seen the first reply to your post. It's the same gadget I have got.

Magentasue

I take the point about the costing - the information I find most useful, you could easily get from your meter. But my meter is at the bottom of the cellar stairs so the energy monitor is useful for me. This is what I check:

- the daily units - we were using about 15 but cut it to an average of 12 although that's gone up in the last couple of weeks
- the current wattage, but only when there's nothing on like the dishwasher, iron etc.

At the moment, ours says 700w which is about normal for an evening ehen we have two TVs, an xbox, three laptops etc on. If it creeps up to a kwh and stays there, I know lights etc have been let on. Same during the day - if it's 700w during the day, I go and find out why.

I found it very useful in getting kids to switch off at the wall - especially when they went out (!) and it made a strong case for replacing our light bulbs. Of course, I could just do the maths but I couldn't get anyone else to listen and take it seriously. They took far more notice of a gadget.

Charis

Magentasue wrote: »

Of course, I could just do the maths but I couldn't get anyone else to listen and take it seriously. They took far more notice of a gadget.

Mm I know what you mean. I'd forgotten what it's like to have a house with several teenagers (just the one left now). :j

I was disappointed in the gadget because I still can't work out how much any one appliance uses, due to the display fluctating wildly. We even wondered if it really measures the correct amount because it very rarely shows the amount we actually pay per month and if we believed its estimates we would be in for [strike]a shock[/strike] an even bigger shock at the end of the quarter.

Magentasue

I think the £display is of little value. I have a plug in monitor that I used on the fridge and freezer over a week to average a cost. I also used it to work out the cheapest washing machine programmes and how much a couple of hours tumble drying costs. The real value of the Currentcost is I don't have to walk around saying 'Switch it off'. I just get one of my carbon fiends to do it and watch the display change. They got really fed up with it - they're much better at switching off now I'm all-seeing and all-knowing!

madrob_2

thanks for all your help will give brit gas a call and when they eventually answer phone see if i can get a freebie

PrinceGaz

Personally I found the best way of keeping my electric consumption in check was with a simple plug-in energy-monitor I bought at Maplins, and then checked how much everything I use uses when turned on and off. It won't take long to find out which appliances eat the energy, and which continue to do so in standby mode (and which appliances actually use a negligible amount in standby meaning there is no reason to turn them off).

If you're paying in the region of 14p per KWh, and that is roughly the current price for most people (not including overnight Economy 7 rates), every hundred watts being consumed works out at almost exactly £10 per month. That makes it easy to convert how much power something is using to what it actually costs you.

A quite bright low-energy bulb that uses twenty watts could be left on 24x7 and would only add about £2 per month to the bill.

On the other hand, tacky way over the top christmas-decorations like some idiots have where the house is covered in lights and they are turned on for eight hours a day and in total consume 3KW while turned on, would be the equivalent of £100 per month (or £300 per month if they left them running 24x7).

Essentially though, once you know exactly how much everything uses, you'll know which appliances to not use unnecessarily, and which to turn off properly. If a TV only uses four watts in standby mode for instance, that would be only 40p per month even if you never turned it on at all. All the time it is turned on and being used is time the standby mode usage doesn't count.

Modern appliances tend to be very efficient in standby mode, which make the commercials about always turning things off at the plug irrelevant. Ten or fifteen years ago, they often guzzled almost as much power in standby as when actually running, but pretty much everything today is far more efficient and can be safely left in standby. And if in doubt, use a plug-in power monitoring meter to check how much it is actually taking in standby mode.

Theo_Cupier

I got one of the same monitors as Charis, via the Southern Electric Better Plan.

I couldn't get it to work so it went back and they sent a replacement which also didn't work.

I can't remember exactly what was wrong with the first one, (I think the receiver and transmitter would never talk to each other) but the second one seemed at least to communicate properly. The problem with the second was that it didn't register any electricity consumption, no matter which wire in or around my fusebox I tried to hook it around.

We now just read the meter daily and make a note of what appliances have been used, how often.