Category:

Energy consumption monitors

I’ve just switched energy suppliers. It was so easy, quick and painless I was left wondering why I hadn’t done it sooner. So now I’m 100% green, having subscribed to a tariff where all of my electric comes from hydro generation.

Well, that’s the theory. In practice the electricity comes from the National Grid just like everyone else’s, and you can’t filter out just the nice bits for my sockets and shunt off all the rest down the road. But at least my bills pay for ethical energy and for more green power plants, and if everyone did the same there would be no need for any new coal or oil stations.

As a nice aside, though, the supplier actually wants you to use less energy rather than more, and so throws in a free energy monitor that tracks your usage and gives live updates on the ongoing cost. Watching it change as you switch lights on and off is proving strangely addictive.

Energy monitor

The picture above shows the house effectively idling. I’m consuming 99 watts to run the fridge, freezer and broadband modem, with the alarm system, TV and digital box in standby (I know TVs on standby are evil, but it lacks an actual off switch, so I’ll be rearranging my plugs to make it easier to switch off at the wall).

So, just to maintain the house in its idle state costs £6.41 a month, or a little over £75 a year, plus the daily standing charge of 14p.

Every time you switch something on or off the value on the meter changes right away, and it tells you in cold hard pounds and pence how much of an incremental increase in your bill that gadget will cost you to run. The results can be quite scary.

Cooking dinner the other night, with four lights burning, the oven on at 190 degrees Celsius, and the aforementioned fridge, freezer, broadband, alarm, TV and digibox doing their stuff, consumption stood at around 300 Watts, which if kept constant would cost about £20 a month to sustain. That’s very cheap, although it does fluctuate slightly as the oven keeps itself up to temperature with occasional boosts. Switch on the kettle, though, and it jumps to 1400 Watts, or £90 a month.

Of course, you wouldn’t keep the kettle boiling constantly for the month, so it’s a slightly exaggerated finding, but it does show how wasteful it is to boil more than the absolute minimum necessary for your drink as the more you boil, the longer you boil and the more you spend.

I refuse to get fanatical about the kettle, but the novelty of watching my real-time electricity usage hasn’t yet worn off, and I do feel a little better about not only saving money, but helping save the planet, too.

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Welcome to Blagger, where we document our move towards a self-sufficient lifestyle, growing our own crops and, eventually, keeping poultry in a suburban back garden. Hop onboard and subscribe to our RSS feed.

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2008-last-leeks-thumbnail.jpgThe harvesting of the leeks marks a far more important passing: they are the last of last year’s vegetables to leave the plot. Adding this to the total harvest for 2007 to date gives a very respectable total of £211.37. I was hoping to break the £200 mark when everything was accounted for, so we’ve exceeded that.

The key to successful blanching is to have everything ready in advance so that you can create a kind of one-person production line.

2008-new-beans-thumbnail.jpgIt’s a year since we first started to grow our own food in the plot, and so we’re finding ourselves repeating some of the things we did around about now 12 months ago. This time around we have more idea of what we should and shouldn’t be doing, which I hope will be reflected in the weight of the crops we produce.

2008_apple_tree-thumbnail.jpgPlant a tree and you get a wonderful sense of achievement. Perhaps it’s because we have it drummed into us from an early age that trees are the world’s lungs and we won’t survive without them, or maybe it’s because when you’re done you can already see the results, and they’re usually four feet high. Here’s how to do it.

2008-beer-bottling-thumbnail.jpgAfter two weeks in the fermenter, it was finally time to bottle the beer this weekend. So, we hoisted the fermenter onto the worktop, tested its gravity and got our sterilised bottles ready…

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Dwarf French BeansWith April now upon us, spring is most definitely sprung. The forecast for this weekend - in the UK, at least - may be for snow and ice (again) but as the air generally warms up, it’s time to start planting in earnest. Here are five crops you should have near the top of your list.

Most of us only ever spring clean in the house - if at all - but as the new growing season begins, it’s equally important to make sure that your garden, and in particular, your greenhouse, are in order.

2008-beer-kit-thumbnail.jpgBeer is very easy to brew, and it’s one of the most cost-effective self-sufficiency moves you can make. You can quickly and easily set up a small brewery under your kitchen counter and, a week or two later, be snapping open your first few home-brewed pints. Here’s how.

If you want to grow any fruit this year, then now’s the time to get your bushes planted. So this weekend we headed out into the plot and planted a new redcurrant tree for this year, and transplanted last year’s blackcurrant tree into a better, more suitable location than the edge of the cabbage patch.

Cornish pastiesCornish pasties are very easy to make - much easier than you probably realise. If you can knock up a pastry you’re half way there, end even if you can’t, you can always buy that part and then fill them with home-grown vegetables and locally-sourced meat.