Power

[poggs]

Having had another £300 gas and electricity bill from our supplier, and on my flatmate's suggestion, I bought a couple of electricity metering devices

Comments

[djpsyche]

That sounds very useful -- could you post the chart once you've done it?

This could help me calculate how much of my power cost I can write off as a business expense! :)

[poggs]

Certainly! The plug was only £13 from Maplin, and the electricity meter clamp thing about £55 - so if you wanted to do it yourself, because appliances vary - it's not terribly expensive for the former.

[alien8]

check out the 'use of part of home as office' £60 a month thing. Don't think you need to bother calculating 'leccy usage :-)

[mattp]

Now, how do I do the same for gas consumption? :-)
Many gas meters have a RJ11 connector where the dials are, but I don't know the electrical characteristics of it.

[poggs]

I suspect it makes and breaks the connection between two pins every 'n' units.

[fyta]

Ooh. Sprinkle a bit of http://www.arduino.cc/ dust on it and you'd be sorted.

[kest]

you could learn to read your gas meter

[hughe]

yeh i saw robin and ruth have one of those too... i'm thinking of getting one too. I would think that the fridge freezer is a consumer of power but not much you can do about that other than keep the doors closed. I keep one PC and thats about all that ends up being on most of the time.
I need to call the elec company becuase, due to a computer error they have given me £500 (or credited it onto my account anyway, so i havnt had a bill for a while). but i'm sure this will get "sorted out" at a later date and leave with a big bill.

[azekeil]

With freezers, if you have the space, store them in an outside utility area. This cuts the energy they require because instead of having to cool from a heated house temperature, they only need to cool from outside ambient temperature.

[hughe]

yeh and on the same line, make sure the back is properly ventilated, especially in fitted kitchens.

Not fridge freezers!

[passengeraction]

Just be very very careful doing that with a fridge freezer unless you are 100% sure it's a twin compressor (look underneath)

Almost all current ones are single compressor and rely soley on the thermostat in the fridge, as the compressor runs through the freezer first and cooling the fridge in a modern house keeps it cold fine.

Put it in the garage or a cold utility room though and the fridge runs much less and then there is not enough cooling in the freezer. If you're lucky it defrosts and you know you have a problem, if you're unlucky it merely doesn't work very well and you get recuring food poisoning.

Check the manual for the minimum temp recommended. Remeber also that you won't be covered by insurance for any wasted food either.

[blue_jez]

I dream of a fusebox/switchbox which runs an snmp daemon allowing you to create trend graphs of the usage of each circuit with something like cacti. But it ain't gonna happen.

As for the gas you only have a few appliances that use it - just read the meter before and after measured periods of usage and calculate it.

On the fridge topic I read somewhere recently that the optimum ambient operating for a fridge is about 21 - too cold can impair efficiency. I can't remeber why and it all may be tosh but might be worth some research.