Wednesday, July 20, 2011

What is happening in my house when I am not there?

My ENVIr energy monitor system from Current Cost is constantly monitoring my electric usage and posting these statistics to the CurrentCost web site where I can view lots of interesting graphs.

I was recently away from the house for a few days, so it was interesting to see how much electricity was being used when there was nobody in the house. As you can see from the screenshot below, their is constant electricity usage rate of roughly 170 watts (probably a sign of the large number of electronic devices on stand-by).

I wondered what this background electricity usage is costing me. For simplicity sake I assumed 30 days in a month, so 170 watts would equate to 122.4 Kilowatt-hours (170x24X30/1000).  If I assume that my electricity rate is around €0.14 per Kilowatt-hour this means that I am using about €17 worth of electricity before I even switch anything on. This is not a huge amount of money, but it world be worth reducing if possible.

Every 2 hours or so the electricity jumps up by 100 watts or so for a period of about 10-15 minutes before dropping back again. I am not certain what causes that, but I guess it might be the fridge/freezer which needs to turn on its motor occasionally to keep the food cold.Again this might be worth investigating further, but I will have to wait until my individual appliance monitors arrive..

No comments:

Post a Comment