How Much Electricity Do You Use?
Because of the wide number of different loads that can be within a house, many people don’t have a good sense of how much electricity they use in a month, or which uses represent the largest portions of their total consumption. And, many loads are intermittent in nature, such as refrigerators and freezers that run in cycles.
You can go out and stare at the wheel on your electric meter and see how fast (or how slowly) it is spinning, but then you are outside your house, and you don’t really know what is going on inside as well as if you were inside. There are a few devices that you can use to get a better sense of what your appliances and equipment are using, and what your electrical usage patterns are.
There are a range of electical plug-in meters that go between your wall socket and the appliance or device. These will show you the exact amount of electricity (usually showing you either the amps or the watts) that is being used. These meters will also log energy use over a period of time, so you can connect one to your refrigerator, for example, and get a total energy use over the course of a day, or even over a few days. For most homeowners, this is going to be more useful than just the momentary figure of what the refrigerator draws while it is running.
In addition, there are whole house loggers that bring the information from the electrical meter into the house, and provide additional information beyond simply showing the accumulated kilowatt hours consumed. The Efergy smart meter tracks energy use every five seconds and converts it into cost and carbon figures, to give you a sense of what your usage is doing to your pocketbook and to the climate.
"The data is stored daily in an easy to access CPU memory so you can actually see the effects of your changing energy habits. Comparing day-to-day usage gives you direct feedback of how daily changes of habit toward energy use can have an effect on costs and estimates the personal contribution to the climate change in terms of carbon emissions."
Efergy is manufactured and sold in the UK.
T.E.D. is a similar device, and is available for the US market. T.E.D. (which stands for The Energy Detective), however, connects directly to wiring inside the electrical panel instead of using induction sensors. This makes it more accurate, but less appropriate for inexperienced DIYers. The Efergy sensor goes around the supply cable, but does not need any special electrical connection. T.E.D. can be programmed to work with time-of-use rate structures and variable price structures. Both of these devices help bring the information about energy use inside the house, where it is possible to see how you are using energy and adjust your habits to increase the efficiency of your power use.
via: LEEDPro
