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DCL
What You Can Measure You Can Improve
A few weeks ago I wrote about a simple rule of thumb to estimate electricity consumption (One Watt, One Year, One Dollar). That's fine if all you need is a rough estimate to give you an idea of where your electricity bill money is going, and what is polluting most in your house (especially in you are not getting green power from your utility).
Today, I want to go a bit deeper. Still not quite as hardcore as getting a power-meter and measuring how much power everything uses, and then monitoring each one to see how long each day it is on on average, and so on (that's probably the best method, but it is labor-intensive). But the next best thing is to use an existing database http://cm.howstuffworks.com/article-template.php?step2and try to match it as closely as possible to your specific situation.
The one I'm recommending today is Michael Bluejay's "Mr. Electricity". The reason why I like it is because it started at the beginning and doesn't assume you already know everything about electricity. It explains what is a kilowatt hour, how electricity is produced in the US (sadly, lots of polluting coal power plants), and much more.
So How Much Do My Appliances Use?
One of the most useful sections of the site is the electricity calculator. You pick the appliance, your electricity costs (or you can stick with the US average if you really don't know, but you should check your bill and find out), how many hours a day the appliance is on, and how many days per month it is used. Once you've entered all that information, you should get a pretty good estimate of how many kilowatt-hours that appliance is using per month, and how much it is costing you per month and per year. On the same page as the calculator you can also find a tutorial that explains how to find out how much electricity various things use.
And if you want to go farther—as I mentioned earlier in this article—you can measure more precisely the electricity consumption of various things, and Mr. Electricity also has a page about that. There are three main methods of doing that: 1) Getting an electric meter that you can plug into a socket, 2) getting a whole-house meter, or 3) use the electric meter on the side of your house (this isn't ideal, but if you turn everything off except for what you want to measure, you should be able to get a good idea of the electrical consumption).
But that's not all. On the left hand side of the site, there are other topics to explore once you've learned the basics. But since my goal today was just to introduce you to a better understanding of your electricity consumption (so you can better reduce it), we'll leave the other stuff for another time.
