Live energy meters are scary

Last week I talked about More Bulb Replacement Taking Place. I had already determined that our energy use was pretty high because of the spotlight halogen bulbs.

The only real way to tell though is to monitor your usage properly and see what things in home have the biggest effect. There's a big push in the UK at the moment to get electricity meters - that is, meter's that show consumption in real terms, instead of simple units used for billing - to help consumers see where they are really using and consuming their energy. See these two pieces at the BBC and New Scotsman.

You can of course get your own, and I've just purchased and installed an OWL Electricity Monitor. This is a wireless unit that connects to your incoming electricity cable (by snapping a monitoring unit around the cable), and then broadcasts your energy usage wireless to a display panel. It can display usage in real terms (kilowatts) or monetarily and the results are, to be honest, somewhat scary.

I wired up the system and noticed that we have a background usage of about 1KW an hour (about 2.50GBP or $5/day). considering this includes all the servers in the server room, that's not that bad.

The effect of the lights? Switching on all the lights we generally use during the evening and we just about treble that usage. Obviously looking at the meter while doing more overtly power-hungry tasks (like switching on the oven or tumble dryer) is enough to give you a heart attack. Seeing a 4GBP ($2)/hour or more rating on the meter makes it very apparent how much your energy charges really are.

The trick now is to found out where, among the power we use in the background, we can reduce the usage and get our standard power usage down so that the spikes. Switching off, or at least to standby, those computers we aren't using is an obvious one, but I'll also be looking at things like the security lights (which come on either during a sense operation, or on timed switches) might be one way to help lessen the load. We already switch off TV/hifi etc rather than leaving them on standby.

If you don't already have one of these meters and think your energy bills are too high (either at home or work, there's no reason not to also check your business electricity usage), I can recommend them, if only to let you confirm where the real power hogs are located.