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.

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.