October;s theme - bye bye standby

The theme for October is to turn appliances off standby.

Apparently People in Britain waste more than £740 million worth of electricity each year leaving appliances on standby.

This equates to the average UK household spending up to 8% of their electricity bill by leaving the red light on at night!

The average home has 12 appliances on standby or on charge.

I've got back into good habits lately with turning off the computer peripherals (laser printer and router) before bed. I had been leaving these on.

This week we set up a power down in the bedroom for our monitor, DVD player and surround sound system. This means by turning off the DVD player, it automatically switches off the other appliances.

We have a CD, amp and pre amp in the lounge, but I'm good at switching those off the wall already and we only use it about once a week anyway.

The mobile phone is only charged about once a month as I never use it and I keep it on trickle charge in the car.

Just out of interest; I've also started using my energy monitor again to see what appliances and gadgets are using the most electricity.

• My laptop is using 1/2 kw per day from 7am to 10pm - about 6p.

• The kettle uses 0.9p to boil the water I need for one drink and 2.4p to boil a full kettle so it really does make a difference to boil only the water you need!

• My dehydrator uses 32p to dry a complete load of food - about 2 kws for 8 hours.

• My mobile phone didn't cost anything LOL! I guess it's either a tiny amount or it was already charged more than I thought when I did it this week; I'll have to do it again and see.

I really think we now turn everything off standby, but I will make the effort this month to spend 5 minutes walking around the house before bed to check.

Electricity usage review

Here's a funky table that my Carbon Watcher person made for me, along with some information and a graph of my electricity usage since December 2008.

I have to admit, my mind has been on other things lately, but with the 1st of a new month upon us, I'm going to take another reading today and see where we can cut back further:

Date	Elec read	kWh	kWh/day	tCO2
09/12/2008	96207	640	20	0.344
01/01/2009	96661	806	26	0.433
01/02/2009	97467	472	17	0.253
01/03/2009	97939	525	17	0.282
01/04/2009	98464	463	15	0.249
01/05/2009	98927	503	16	0.270
01/06/2009	99430	646	18	0.347
06/07/2009	77
Total		4055		2.177

The kWh for December are pro rata as there was nearly a third of a month “missing” but the kWh per day is real. I’ve put this in to help you see whether your consumption is really increasing, as feared. 1 kWh difference per day is the equivalent of having a 1 bar electric fire running for an hour, or a 60W light bulb on for 16 hours every day - so quite a lot of energy really! If you’re already pretty on top of your electricity use (and I think you are) I think you’re right to query the immersion heater.

Don’t be disheartened about the increase in electricity usage – it’s only a 5% variance and as your footprint was tiny to start with it was always going to be harder to see any savings made.

Since the beginning of Carbon Watchers in December 2009 you’ve been sending us
monthly readings from your electricity meter. From this we have calculated
your carbon emissions over the last seven months as follows:
•
You’ve used 4,055 kWh of electricity, which equates to 2.2 tonnes of carbon
emissions. That’s enough to fill 12 double-decker buses! To offset this amount of carbon you’d
need to plant 9 trees and maintain this number to keep the carbon locked away.
The graph below shows the pattern of your carbon emissions from electricity:

Feb electricity usage

I'm still a bit stunned. Yesterday I spent an hour creating a spreadsheet for my electricity usage. I'm not very adept at using spreadsheets, so I was tearing my hair out by the end of it. Anyway, I know have one that works - go me!

That's the good news.

The bad news is that even with trying to reduce our usage as much as possible over the month we have used 524 kwh, which equates to £64.75
We have a capped rate, and I think it's cheap (11p inclu tax per unit plus 13p daily standing order). The fluctuation of prices means I feel better on a capped tariff, but maybe it's time to shop around. Perhaps I'd be better off paying more and not having a daily standing charge. I find the whole thing a minefield to be honest which leads to procrastination.

My goal is to join a green provider, but there is no way I can finance that at the moment. We'd have to get our usage right down because they are generally more expensive. (in my limited knowledge)

Last two meter readings

My head is swimming with figures! We've kept to putting the immersion on for one hour in the morning and not having it on again.

DH has just washed up and the water is certainly warm enough for every day washing up. It wouldn't be any good for a greasy meal, but that's only once a week on a Sunday anyway. For that, we can boil up the kettle.

There is a significant drop in our readings so far.

Yesterday's was 97609 (which was 19 - I used the washing machine twice and did a fair amount of cooking)
Today's is 97721 (which is just 12 units) and DH has just put the water on for a bath, so tomorrow's will be higher.

A tankless water heater is definitely the way forward. Although I have to admit, I'm still a bit perplexed. Today I made rice pudding on the hob, which cooked for 1 1/2 hours. It's a real minefield. I have a friend's OWL monitor, but it's next to useless as it doesn't give you the reading you want to know. It shows you that having the shower on, the kettle boiling and the hob on is using 70p an hour, but it doesn't tell you a cumulative total such as HOW MUCH the 5 minute shower costs.

I have a plug in kill-a-watt, but that is limited as you can only put it into things with a socket. Items like the immersion or cooker that don't have a plug, you can't use it on and these are the things I want to know most about! In addition, the plugs for the fridge and freezers are behind them, so I can't get to the sockets.

I thought it would be much more straight forward than this, but I guess there are some unknowns like refrigeration cutting in and out..............

ho hum. 12 units per day is very encouraging. And you know what? As I look up, I see DH has left two lights on when he went out the room. grrrr. Some habits die hard!

Interesting day

Right, in my quest for the dastardly mystery electric user, I turned off the immersion for 24 hours. I wanted to try and recapture yesterday's electricity usage to get a feel for what was going on, but I had to use the oven for 1 1/2 hours and one of the hobs for quite a long time too.

I checked the meter at the beginning of lunch prep and afterwards, and had used 2 1/2 units. That's a rough guide as we had computers and refrigeration running too, but at least it gave us an idea.

We've had no baths (obviously!), no washing machine, and tried to keep everything else as 'normal' as possible. I've been keeping water warm on top of the wood burner which, along with warm water kept in the hot water tank has been fine for washing up. We wouldn't be able to wash up after a greasy meal with that, but for every day food it was fine.

In addition, it took about 20 seconds to boil a mug of water for tea and coffee by using pre-heated from the woodburner poured into the kettle. Every little bit helps, right?

Annnnnyway, after all that, living as frugally as possible for 24 hours, turning off unnecessary lights and keeping things to a bare minimum, we have used 13 units. Our reading is now 97590

Shocking huhn? Two hours of water a day has been costing us a LOT of money.

You'll see over to the right my goals point towards tankless water heaters. Now we have decided that these are first on the list on necessity. Hot water gets used every day, whereas heating is only necessary for half of the year.

We've discussed that now we are going to have the water coming on for an hour in the mornings and if we want a bath in the evening, we boost it for another hour later in the day. I have to admit I LIKE hot water en tap (boom boom) all the time. It's great that I can have a bath whenever I choose and if Dd gets herself in a mess then I can clean her up. But it's coming at a huge financial and environmental cost, so it's time to change our ways.

No baths!

I'm like a woman possessed! Since our ridiculous meter reading I've been taking daily readings. Sunday was a 'usual Sunday' - this involves use of two ovens for making Sunday dinner, we had the washing machine going and I think DH had a bath. We used 26 units.

Yesterday I put my frugal head on. I went round the house like the light police, challenging anyone who left one on. I didn't use the washing machine, didn't put the oven on, stopped people having baths and we STILL used 18 units.

Now I don't know about you, but I think that is a lot. I used the hob really efficiently too. I've figured that all electric hobs are a big waste of money. You pay for heating the room. So I bought things to the boil, put a well fitting lid on and left convection to do its work. I also insisted that we ate things like soup; so nothing that actually needed 'cooking' only things that needed warming through.

That meant that 18 units was warming up food and paying for the lighting and computers. And the immersion heater that comes on for an hour, twice a day.

When I took the reading last night and saw how much we had still got through I decided to switch the immersion off. It will remain off for 24 hours until I do the next reading. I'm going to use everything else in exactly the same way for the day and take a look at the difference. There is no reason why this should not drop us into single figures; surely.

But now I'm concerned about our refrigeration costs. We have one under counter fridge and one full size fridge, plus one large freezer. The two large appliances are in a room with no heating; a bit like a garage, so I would expect them to be using very little juice. You just never know though.

This is a real mystery and one which is driving me crazy..........

Just for the record, the readings are:
Friday 6th 97512
Saturday 7th 97533 (21 units)
Sunday 8th 97559 (26 units)
Monday 9th 97577 (18 units)

All readings are taken 9pm

First Electricity meter reading

On the first day of the month, the carbon watchers are supposed to take a meter reading and send it in to Severn Wyre Agency. I meant to do it first thing this morning, but I've only just remembered!

Never mind; at least I have the right day. Our reading is 96661. Throughout the year we're going to be logging this to see if we can reduce the amount of electricity we use.

The village we live in does not have mains gas, so that reading is not applicable for us. In addition, we run a woodburner, so our winter electricity usage shouldn't be too much more than our summer usage, although we do have a couple of electric convector heaters as a back up heat source and I do tend to cook more meals in the winter.