Wednesday, July 13, 2011

How much energy am I using in the kitchen

I recently purchased an ENVIr energy monitor system from Current Cost to track my electricity usage at home. I am still waiting for delivery of the bridge device which will allow me to publish my data to the Internet in real time, but I thought I would share some initial data that I manually recorded.

It seems that the energy consumption in the house never goes much below 200 watts (probably due to things like networking equipment and other electronic devices that I have at home). Unfortunately they are out of stock on the Individual Appliance Monitors which would allow me to track the usage of individual devices but I was able to estimate the consumption of various appliances in the kitchen by switching them on and off and looking at how much this changed my total electric power consumption.

The first thing I measured was my cappuccino maker (which is often the first device switched on in the morning). This actually consists of three different devices, a milk warmer which consumed about 615 watts, an espresso maker which consumed about 730 watts and a frother for the milk which only consumed about 5 watts. This meant that the total consumption was 1.35 Kilowatts. For comparison I measured the filter coffee maker and it only consumed 950 watts so I could trim about 30% off my power consumption (as well as trimming a few inches from my waistline) by switching to filter coffee. However, I was surprised to learn that the kettle was consuming about 2.94 kilowatts - so if I went back to instant coffee my power consumption would more than double.

I will post more data over the next few days as I make more measurements.

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