On Friday we bought ourselves a shiny new WATTSON home energy monitor from our local Maplin.
The device is one of many available that do pretty much the same job. Check your energy consumption via a clip placed on the live wire near your electricity metre, which is sent wirelessly to a display unit (portable and “wireless”, as long as the built in battery is charged up), so you can keep tabs on your energy consumption.
This particular unit costs close to £100, whether or not it will pay for itself in energy consumption reduction is yet to be seen, but it’s already making a bit of a difference, and proving some interesting, if not entirely insightful (at this stage) readings.
One of the first missions had to be childishly running around switching off every plug about the house to get the reading to zero. This proved harder than we imagined… It took some time to realise that we hadn’t switched off the smoke/fire alarm circuit, which was constantly demanding about 48 watts.
Anyway, nothing much to report on this at the moment, apart from I was surprised how little power (relatively) a tv, sky box and amp combination consume, how much the eco-hat appears to be eating up (around 80 or so Watts on “normal” (not boost) operation) and just how much our Kenwood Eco Kettle consumes, around 2,700 Watts. Although the kettle is rapid boil and has a handy measure on the side, so it’s never on for longer than required!
The nice thing about the Wattson is it gives you a constant readout in either numbers, colours, or both. This includes a not entirely useful readout of how much a years worth of your current power consumption would cost at the current rate.
The best part is when you plug it into your Mac or PC and start logging data, we’ve only got two days worth, but it’s interesting and at the moment quite fun (hope the novelty doesn’t wear off too fast) to see how demand for power changes throughout the day. You can also share this data on the DIY KYOTO website with other Wattson / Holmes users.
Anyway, the longer we have this up and running the more useful things it may give me to say about energy consumption and ideas for reducing it. So far, my best advice is avoid reboiling the kettle whenever possible!
Here’s the Holmes readout covering our initial “play time” and beyond:
