Sub £50 energy consumption monitor. It says it'll save you 25% off energy bills

espresso

LadFromWales85 wrote: »

EDIT: Do any of these have the ability to take into account the cheaper rate of E7?

The plug-in type energy monitors sold by Lidl can be programmed for dual tariffs e.g. Economy 7. You will find a link to the instructions in this thread.

Cardew

vinylmusic wrote: »

I almost bought one in Lidl yesterday but weighed things up in my mind first.
Surely if your going to use an appliance your going to use it whatever.
You should be able to get an idea from the wattage. Almost every appliance shows its wattage.
The higher the wattage the more youir going to use.
When buying a fridge or a freezer for example I look at the wattage and its economy rating.
Having a meter isnt going to stop me using it.
I dont see the point of a meter since thats just extra cost

The wattage of the majority of appliances is no indication of the power they consume, and hence the cost to run.

That particulary applies to items like fridges and freezers. They could all have, say, a 250W compressor but the crucial issue is how long the compressor runs in a set period. Mine with, say, a faulty seal might cost 3 times as much as it should.

My cold fill washing machine is rated at 3kW if I look at the back plate. An average cycle takes 90 mins. So simply looking at the wattage you might assume that it will use 4.5kWh for a cycle(say 36p) . In fact the majority of washes use 0.6kWh and rarely 0,9kWh.

There so much hype about standby consumption that using them might explode the myth that all you need to do to cut your electricity bills massively is switch your TV off standby;) and ignore far more important issues!

davidbr

I bought the Maplin one for £39.99 yesterday and it is great. Easy to setup and worked perfectly straight away all over my house. Spent last night watching it and it was better than the telly.:j

Costs 20p and hour to run my kettle, but my tipical usage last night was about 4p an hour. At bedtime this went down to 2p.

Shows cost, kw, and C02, saves data daily, weekly and monthly.

jolson

I've been scouring the internet for one of these, and the best price I've found so far is the Efergy at Engenia. It's £35.60 + £2.69, they do the Owl for a couple of quid more. The check out has a place for a promotional code.... anyone know one??

Cheers

John

Chrysalis

Modern powerful cpus if configured properly actually have low power.

core 2 duo chips and amd64 chips both are power efficient now days high end graphics cards are the problem but are unlikely to be in prebuilt mainstream computers and will not be in any laptops.

My desktop pc has multiple hard drives and uses less then 300 watts a typical desktop pc including monitor I expect would use less then 150 watts.

mech_2

I gave in to my curiosity and bought one of the plug-in energy usage monitors from Lidl for £6.99. I've only tried it on my fridge so far and my reservations turned out to be justified.

Unless I've done something very wrong, it seems to think my fridge has used nearly £9 worth of electricity in just over 3 days. Which would be nearly £1000 a year to run JUST my fridge. Either these things don't work well with fridges, or they can't add up. The cost display is therefore useless. Maybe this is why they are so cheap?

Having said that, the live display seems to show sensible figures. Plus, it can tell you how long the appliance was switched on for, so you can calculate what the cost really should be with a calculator. For my fridge, based on the number of hours the compressor was on, and the watts it was using when on, I estimate it would cost around £33 a year to run. That seems reasonable.

shammyjack

It

mech wrote: »

I gave in to my curiosity and bought one of the plug-in energy usage monitors from Lidl for £6.99. I've only tried it on my fridge so far and my reservations turned out to be justified.

Unless I've done something very wrong, it seems to think my fridge has used nearly £9 worth of electricity in just over 3 days. Which would be nearly £1000 a year to run JUST my fridge. Either these things don't work well with fridges, or they can't add up. The cost display is therefore useless. Maybe this is why they are so cheap?

Having said that, the live display seems to show sensible figures. Plus, it can tell you how long the appliance was switched on for, so you can calculate what the cost really should be with a calculator. For my fridge, based on the number of hours the compressor was on, and the watts it was using when on, I estimate it would cost around £33 a year to run. That seems reasonable.

It souds to me as though you have entered the cost per kwh incorrectly.


For example, 13.57p should be entered as 0.1357 . 9.45p as 0.0945 .

My A+ rated FF costs 5p a day to run on my tariff .

shammy

shammy

LadFromWales85

Had a nosey, and it seems as though the difference between the Efergy and The Owl are:-
The OWl shows humidity and temperature but lacks any memory for storing history
Efergy lacks humity and temperature display, but can show usage for today and the previous 6 days, this month and the previous 23 months, and last year.

I read reuk.co.uk that a new Electrisave is due out later this year which will have the history functions, and also support split tariffs and E7.

espresso

mech wrote: »

Unless I've done something very wrong, it seems to think my fridge has used nearly £9 worth of electricity in just over 3 days. Which would be nearly £1000 a year to run JUST my fridge. Either these things don't work well with fridges, or they can't add up. The cost display is therefore useless. Maybe this is why they are so cheap?

:doh:

Try reading the instructions! Perhaps it's you that's useless.

:rotfl:

mech_2

[re: Lidl plug-in meter]
I can't imagine what I could have done wrong for it to get that figure. It doesn't seem to correspond to anything.

Maybe a mains spike scrambled its memory or something. I'll give it another chance. I've not only reset it, but removed the batteries and put them back in. I've re-entered everything from scratch and I'll see if it gets different figures this time.