ENERGY MONITORING

Since the events of the last few months where its clear that energy prices are going to grow out of control, it forced me to review the way we used energy in our home. I have spent alot of time over the last few years adding this device, that device with a small amount of thought as to what energy usage consequence there would be.

The easy ones were in lighting. In stages, I replaced ligt bulbs from the traditional 100w and 40w bulbs for LED ones where when we have around 58 bulbs in the house, this can clearly become a huge cost to light the home.

In the example that is the most cost effective, we used to have 18 x 40w bulbs in the kitchen. These have been replaced with multicolur wifi 5w bulbs. We have gone from warm white 40w bulbs using in total 720w of energy to having lights we can have any colour we want using 90w of energy (less that 1 x 100w bulb).

In energy speak, if we were to leave these on all day and night the original bulbs would use 17.28 kWh per day. The replacement bulbs only use 2.16 kWh per day. And this is just one room of the house. I used a kWh calculator to to help me work out the figures.

FRONT ROOM

I placed a smart plug with energy monitoring in the front room to monitor what was being used on a 24 hour basis to see what energy we were wasting and I was truely shocked by the results.

Like most people, we leave everything on standby overnight as what harm could it do, as there are only little red lights on, and how much power would they use – not much I thought. I was wrong, as the light is just one small part, as the equipment, while using less energy in standby, still uses a significant amount.

Remember:
Our front room equipment consist of a TV, Sky Q Box, Surround Sound Amp, Nvidia box, Network switch, a 4k to 1080p converter and a few other bits and bobs. While in standby all of this kit was using 150w of energy – IN STANDBY. I discussed this with my wife who was equally supprised and we decided to turn off everything we could for the overnight hours. Every night our smart 4 gangs turn off everything except the Sky Q box and turn it all on again around 6.30am.

The overnight energy usage dropped from 150w to around 70w – over 1/2.

To put a cost against this period using those readings it comes out as:

150w over 8 hours = 1.2kWh and at our current rate of £0.15 per kWh costs £0.18p.

Multiply £0.18p per night for a year, and this costs £65.70.

Now to the savings:

70w over 8 hours = 0.56 kWh and at our current rate of £0.15 per kWh costs £0.08p.

Multipl £0.08p per night for a year and this costs £29.20.

Doing this one small change that we do not even notice saves us £36.50 per year.

In addition to that I wanted to see if we could save anything during the day.

Using our TV and connected devices, it showed we were using 350w when watching TV. When my wife is working in the front room she likes to have the TV on in the background and ordinarily we use the TV from 5pm – 11pm every day (around 6 hours a night). Discounting my wife’s usage as its not consistant, the normal hours per day are so I will base the next savings on that.

350w over 6 hours = 2.1kWh and at our current rate of £0.15 per kWh costs £0.31p.

Multiply £0.31p per night for a year and this costs £113.15.

I played around with the TV settings while watching the energy monitor so see if anything I did made any difference. I discovered that if I changed the settings on the TV from Dynamic to Movie the picture was a lot less bright but still very watchable and the energy montor dropped from 350w to 130w.

To see how that effects the costs

130w over 6 hours = 0.78kWh and at our current rate of £0.15 per kWh costs £0.11p.

Multiply £0.11p per night for a year and this costs £40.15.

Doing this change which again, we don’t really notice the difference save us £73 per year.

Combining these two factors and making these almost invisible changes to our usage saves us a total of £109.50 per year.

These simple changes will save us around 8% of our total electricity bill.

Energy Price Increase

To show what promoted this investigation and changes, our current rate of £0.15 which is locked in until February 2023 will change to around £0.53 (at todays rate which is most likely going to go up before February 2023) and using this figure to project what it would cost on the new rate really was a wake up call.

If we were on the £0.55 rate the savings would change from:

Leaving on overnight costs would change from £36.50 to £109.50 per year and watching TV in the evening would change from £113.50 to £419.75 per year.

Turning everything off overnight savings would increase from £36.50 to £43.80 per year.
Turning everything off overnight savings would increase from £113.50 to £306.25 per year.

Total savings against new energy rate would be: £350.05 per year.

Unless we save energy in our household on or before next year the cost for our electricity at current usage would increase from around £1,300 to £4,750.