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I'm moving in a couple of weeks, and when I get to my new place I want to keep an eye on and generally reduce my electricity usage. I've had a look online to see what monitors are available and wasn't sure which features would actually be useful and which gimmicks ( apart from wanting the ability to download to a PC ).
What do you have installed/what would you recommend ?
Download to pc is good, I even set mine up so I could check useage over the internet.
Some come with software that plot useage per day, week etc which is good.
Individual device monitoring (with extra sensors) is also worth having, or at least, able to add them later.
Find out what a monitor costs then spend the money on 3W LED bulbs and 36W strips lights instead.
Then go through the appliances and work out which ones it's worth replacing, they'll all have the power consumtion in the instructions. I worked out it was worth replacing the oven and installing a solar water heater but that the fridge, hob and everything else could stay as they were nearly as good as the latest models.
Maplin have plug-in meters for under a tenner.
You can get an Arduino based electricity monitoring thing for not much money. Runs of a small 9v transformer, logs the data to an SD card for transfer to a PC and graphing. Even has a clock on it for timestamps.
You'll need to do a bit of fiddling with it though, but that's half the fun.
Sorry, forgot to include the link...
[url= http://www.airsensor.co.uk/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=5&category_id=5&vmcchk=1&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=2 ]Linky[/url]
Used a plug in monitor to see what individual appliances used and also read the meter every few weeks to make sure that I keep it low. Most of the time it's easy to see where you can save energy. The only time you might need to monitor is if you want to replace something like a fridge.
I asked for a free one from npower(our supplier) and installed it. It tells us current usage and tots it up over the day. Good to get a benchmark and makes an exciting game trying to get it as low as possible. Also very good for letting you know what costs a lot. Baking is expensive!
Extra details: Fits around the main power wire into the house and wirelessly transmits signal to little monitor next to the tv.
The npower one is good but they dont do it anymore!
npower free one is good enough for me, doesn't download to a PC but it's nice and easy to walk around with switching stuff off and on
that's a pity, early bird and all that
nPower release the free meter offer perodically, I can only assume it's when they decide their website's been up for too long and need it to crash.
I don't see the point myself, they could get the same effect by moving to the same Colo as STW.