Electricity Saving Tips : Use an Electricity Monitor to Cut Your Electric Costs

In this age of ever increasing costs for energy usage, in particular electricity, you may be surprised to hear of a simple gadget that allows you to monitor how much electricity different devices are using.

With a Home Energy Monitor, it's easy to see where you might unexpectedly be wasting electricity, and using this knowledge you can begin to put energy saving strategies into place and see your monthly charges lowered as a result.

The device that helps you to monitor your electricity usage is supplied free by some electric providers, British Gas for example, or you can search on the internet and find one for a very low cost.

A Home Energy Monitor consists of two parts.

The first part is the transmitter. This has a clamp that fits around the electric cable that comes into your electric meter, and is usually powered by disposable batteries. It detects the amount of electricity that is flowing into your meter, and transmits it wirelessly to a receiver.

The receiver is an LCD screen, that plugs into an electric socket, but uses only pennies/cents a year to operate.

This receiver displays the current electric usage either as KWh (Kilowatt Hours) or in monetary units. With most of them you can also enter the current cost per electric unit, and set it to display the cost since a given time.

Installation of the device is very simple. Put the batteries in the transmitter, fit the monitor around the cable coming into the meter and tighten it. Plug in the receiver, synchronize this with the transmitter, and that is about it. The process takes no longer than five minutes.

The beauty of this device is that the data is transmitted wirelessly, and therefore the receiver can be plugged in wherever it suite you best, be this the kitchen, living room, utility room etc. As long as the receiver is within range of the transmitter it will work.

So how does the electricity monitor help you to save on your energy costs?

The electricity monitor helps you to do this very simply, by constantly displaying the amount of electricity that you are using.

Every time you turn on or turn off a device, the amount of electricity that is being used will be shown on the LCD screen.

The first thing to do is to see what your base usage is, the amount of electricity that is being used when nothing is running, except the essential devices.

Essential devices include things like electric clocks (including alarm clocks, electric stove, microwave etc), the television, cable box, DVD player etc, and other things that you usually leave plugged in but switched off.

Having noted the basic electricity usage, you can then begin turning on individual devices to see how much electricity they use.

We all know that you can save electricity by turning off lights and the television when they are not being used, and by using this electricity monitoring device, you can see exactly how much you are saving or wasting.

Some people leave their television on all day long when they are at home, and that might also include playing the sound through a Home Theater System as well, and you may have a shock when you see how much electricity is being used by these devices. Considering that often they are left on but not being watched, you have some scope for saving money by only turning them on when you are going to sit and watch them.

It's quite a fun task turning individual devices and lights on and off, and something that the whole family can get involved in too, and it's important, especially if you have children, that they understand how much everything costs, and that electricity is not cheap.

It's also not good for the environment if we use more than we need to, so this is a good lesson for them.

Especially if you use energy saving bulbs, the electricity monitor might not show much change when you turn some lights on or off, but that old 25 light chandelier that doesn't use energy saving bulbs - you might just have a shock at how much electricity it uses.

You can also see how much is being used when you turn on the air conditioning, or the furnace, and the monitor helps you to appreciate the difference you can make to your electricity costs just by adjusting the thermostat by a degree or two.

Here in the UK we heat our water for coffee and tea using electric kettles, and I had a shock to find that ours uses 2KW to heat water! Now instead of always filling the kettle every time we want hot water, we only add the amount of water that we need, so for a mug of tea, we only boil enough water for that, and not enough for 10 mugs.

The biggest usage for us is our electric shower. There are two settings, but on the lower setting, where the water is not heated up so fast, the flow of hot water is not fast enough to have a decent shower, and so we use the full setting on the shower.

Imagine the shock I had when my wife was having a shower, and I saw that the electricity monitor was reading 8KW! That means the shower uses the equivalent of 4 electric kettles when it is in use, so if you enjoy spending an extra five minutes taking a shower, that cost really does add up.

The other device that people don't think of when you list devices that use electricity in the home, is the vacuum cleaner.

Now this is an essential device, at least in some households, but ours for example uses 1.8KW. We only thought to check because our electric bill had gone up significantly in the last month, and we couldn't figure out why.

Then it dawned on us, that this is when we got our dog, who sheds a tremendous amount of hair, and also keeps bringing mud in on his feet, and so we are vacuuming at least once a day instead of several times a week.

Different people have different homes and different lifestyles of course, and so your scope for saving electricity is likely to be different to ours, but by using an electricity monitor like we do, you have the opportunity to see exactly which devices are causing a drain on your finances, and you have a chance to take corrective action and to lower your electricity charges.

Sources:

Personal Experience

Saving Energy With A Home Energy Monitor

Homes To Get Free Energy Monitors