Tapo P110

Slinky

Alnat1 said:

@Slinky Why do you use gas to heat water that you don't use? Wouldn't it save more to only heat what you need each day?

We have a separate hot water cylinder heated by gas which hold 210 litres. It's heated for an hour a day. Half an hour doesn't give us enough and our Nest system only works in half hour increments. We don't use all of it for showering, washing up etc, so I draw water from this to use in the washing machine (which is cold fill only).

Alnat1

ah ok, makes sense then, we can set ours to 40 minutes a day.

Also good to know that Nest would be worse for us than the more basic controls we presently have.

Slinky

Alnat1 said:

ah ok, makes sense then, we can set ours to 40 minutes a day.

Also good to know that Nest would be worse for us than the more basic controls we presently have.

I wasn't convinced we needed a smart system but OH was persuaded that this all singing all dancing thing would help us save money.  I think I've managed to get control of it, instead of it randomly deciding to do its own thing, e.g. coming on in the middle of the night to save us from the miniscule chance of legionella being in the system for example.

Slinky

Just evicted a 'mother and child' lamp from the lounge. Put the Tapo on it and discovered that mother draws between 100-175 watts depending on how bright you have it.  Suspected it might be high. Have replaced with one drawing 18w which I need to get a bright lower energy bulb for.

Mstty

Slinky said:

Just evicted a 'mother and child' lamp from the lounge. Put the Tapo on it and discovered that mother draws between 100-175 watts depending on how bright you have it.  Suspected it might be high. Have replaced with one drawing 18w which I need to get a bright lower energy bulb for.

Surely it's the bulbs drawing the power and the lamp could have run led bulbs? (Dimmable led bulbs are a real thing too)

Slinky

It's an old lamp and has strange bulbs. Shaped like and the width of a pencil, about 4 inches long. Doubt there's an LED equivalent, and certainly not in this house at 5pm tonight when I tested it!

BooJewels

If you want a dimmable light, I've got a couple of overhead 'big' lights with dimmer switches that I've put dimmable LED bulbs in, but they're not entirely happy and sometimes flicker a bit at anything less than fully on.

But I recently added some Hive smart bulbs to a couple of overhead lights - largely because I wanted smart switches but can't have them, as I have old wiring - and the bulbs themselves switch and dim using the app (Tapo and Philips do them too) - one set are tuneable and you can change the colour of the light too.  These work much more reliably at lower light levels than the earlier ones I have.  The bulbs are more expensive to start with - but they're worth it to me for the convenience and functionality they offer.  For example, as I live on my own, I can go upstairs to bed and turn off the downstairs hall lights once upstairs and once in bed, I can turn off the landing light, which I tend to keep dimmed to about 40%. They use the same power regardless of the light level, as I understand it.  You can put more than one in a light fitting and have them at different levels but switched on and off as a group.

The only downside for me is that they work brilliantly for me on my own - but when I had guests staying over Christmas, all my smart stuff got a bit complicated.

badger09

Slinky said:

Just evicted a 'mother and child' lamp from the lounge. Put the Tapo on it and discovered that mother draws between 100-175 watts depending on how bright you have it.  Suspected it might be high. Have replaced with one drawing 18w which I need to get a bright lower energy bulb for.

Thanks for this. You’ve just alerted me to my next Tapo target. We have one of those lamps in the room we use most evenings. Sounds like it has similar bulbs too. 

nxdmsandkaskdjaqd

BooJewels said:

The washing machine does show something similar - this was mine yesterday on a 30°C quick wash - I've stopped doing quick washes for laundry, this was a descaling run I did.  I've actually found that a full length wash uses very little extra power over a quick wash, but you get an extra 30+ minutes of actual washing - so I've gone from a quick 40°C wash to a long 30°C wash as routine now - it's saving me around 180Wh per load without compromising cleaning - if anything, I think it's an improvement.

There's the one big peak for the water heating - the smaller peaks are spinning sessions.  I was surprised when I first put the P110 on the washing machine that whilst most of the energy was in the water heating, which was to be expected - how little energy it uses to just turn and splosh the washing, rinse etc etc.  I average around 0.5kWh per normal load and it costs me on average about a pound a month for laundry - much less than I was expecting.  Because I live on my own, I often do small batches by hand and only spin them in the machine too - and those costs are even lower - the spins average under 30Wh each.

What was a surprise yesterday was an experiment I did.  I decided it was time to do some machine maintenance, so did the decaling load as shown, but then ran a hot wash with soda crystals in to rid it of soap scum etc.  I'd read other threads where people were saving machine energy by part filling the machine with hot water from other sources - or into the detergent drawer when it was filling etc.  I just didn't think it would be worth the effort and potential for mess for me, as my machine is in a narrow room.  But as I wanted to run the machine at 90°C and there wasn't any laundry in it, decided to risk it.  I filled the drum with 2 boiled kettles and a large jug of hot tap water, as I'd just run it hot for something else.

That 90°C cycle only used 0.245kWh - there was a brief heating spike after 16 minutes when it must have dropped temperature and gave it a quick boost, but it seemed to run normally otherwise.  Quite a lot less than the 1.844kWh the previous 90°C cycle my visiting sister ran last month.  Obviously boiling the kettle twice will have used 300-400Wh but still a significant saving.  I might try a couple of jugs of hot water before my next normal wash and see what that does.

So if you can add a kettle to water to the washing machine, could you add a kettle of water to the dishwasher to reduce energy consumption.?

MattMattMattUK

nxdmsandkaskdjaqd said:

BooJewels said:

The washing machine does show something similar - this was mine yesterday on a 30°C quick wash - I've stopped doing quick washes for laundry, this was a descaling run I did.  I've actually found that a full length wash uses very little extra power over a quick wash, but you get an extra 30+ minutes of actual washing - so I've gone from a quick 40°C wash to a long 30°C wash as routine now - it's saving me around 180Wh per load without compromising cleaning - if anything, I think it's an improvement.

There's the one big peak for the water heating - the smaller peaks are spinning sessions.  I was surprised when I first put the P110 on the washing machine that whilst most of the energy was in the water heating, which was to be expected - how little energy it uses to just turn and splosh the washing, rinse etc etc.  I average around 0.5kWh per normal load and it costs me on average about a pound a month for laundry - much less than I was expecting.  Because I live on my own, I often do small batches by hand and only spin them in the machine too - and those costs are even lower - the spins average under 30Wh each.

What was a surprise yesterday was an experiment I did.  I decided it was time to do some machine maintenance, so did the decaling load as shown, but then ran a hot wash with soda crystals in to rid it of soap scum etc.  I'd read other threads where people were saving machine energy by part filling the machine with hot water from other sources - or into the detergent drawer when it was filling etc.  I just didn't think it would be worth the effort and potential for mess for me, as my machine is in a narrow room.  But as I wanted to run the machine at 90°C and there wasn't any laundry in it, decided to risk it.  I filled the drum with 2 boiled kettles and a large jug of hot tap water, as I'd just run it hot for something else.

That 90°C cycle only used 0.245kWh - there was a brief heating spike after 16 minutes when it must have dropped temperature and gave it a quick boost, but it seemed to run normally otherwise.  Quite a lot less than the 1.844kWh the previous 90°C cycle my visiting sister ran last month.  Obviously boiling the kettle twice will have used 300-400Wh but still a significant saving.  I might try a couple of jugs of hot water before my next normal wash and see what that does.

So if you can add a kettle to water to the washing machine, could you add a kettle of water to the dishwasher to reduce energy consumption.?

Probably not, dishwashers fully drain themselves before starting the cycle, they then rinse with cold water and use cold rinses at various points, so you would need to know exactly the point in the cycle it injects the water then heats it and even then it might throw the program out with the water coming in hot not cold. 

Additionally if you are using an electric kettle the cost of heating will be exactly the same as using the dishwasher's element and if you are using a gas kettle the savings are going to be very minimal, in the pennies range.