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Cut down those fuel bills - how to be a stand-by saver
Jonathan Margolis looks at the best electricity-monitoring gadgets
Ever-rising fuel bills can be the best stimulus there is for a spate of eco-friendliness. A range of electricity-monitoring gadgets offer the chance to save money and make you feel you are helping the planet.
Sold almost as educational tools, they provide continuous information about how much electricity you use, so you can experiment with energy-saving strategies. They are very sensitive and will register even the smallest rise or fall in consumption, such as the effect of plugging in a laptop or mobile phone charger.
The makers of the various gadgets emphasise that it’s not always the obvious power-hungry appliances that bump up bills.
They maintain you will be shocked by the amount of electricity used by 'always on' things like fridge/freezers and gadgets plugged into the mains via those ubiquitous black mains adaptors, as well as notoriously wasteful 'standby' devices, especially flat-screen TVs.
They claim that a careful power audit using a monitoring gadget should help you adopt tactics to save up to 25%. If you can cut background electricity consumption – the power burnt while you are asleep or out – by 1p per hour, they explain, you can save more than £85 a year.
What kind of gadgets are available?
They are all similar in principle, but offer a range of ingenious measurements. Some, for example, will give a constant readout of the power you are using as you use it; others will show you effectively how much carbon dioxide you are pumping into the atmosphere; others still will produce a constantly updated projection of your annual electricity bill.
The gadgets range in price from about £40 to the most expensive, the stylish Wattson (see www.diykyoto.com) at around £150. To see a range, you can visit www.theowl.com, www.efergy.com or www.eco-eye.com. And www.electricity-monitor.com sells a range of devices from the above sites and also – rather cunningly – offers a rental service at just under £20 a month.
It may seem odd to rent for £20 something that can be bought for £40 or so, but as the company explains, a month spent pottering around with such a meter should be enough to re-educate yourself in green (and mean) methods. You could also argue that by having a product to pass on from user to user, you are also doing a tiny bit to reduce emissions.
How do they work?
The nice thing is that they don’t have to be wired in. They work by means of a sensor clamped over a key cable close to the electricity meter and measure the current flowing through the wire by monitoring its magnetic field. Installation needs a certain amount of concentration, but shouldn’t defeat too many buyers.
The devices all have their business end – the LCD screen – on a wireless remote unit that you can move around the house, so you can place the screen next to any gadget whose power consumption you are investigating at the time.
Does monitoring your usage help the environment?
Hmm, depends how you look at it, really. The beauty of this kind of detailed monitoring from the environmentalists' point of view is that greenness and meanness go hand in hand, making power saving a classic 'win-win'. If you suspect that, savings aside, it’s all a bit of a trendy fad, you’ll enjoy reading How to Live a Low-Carbon Life by Chris Goodall (Earthscan Publications). Goodall is a red-blooded environmentalist, a Green Party activist and a Harvard-trained economist.
By applying ruthless methodology to our new green habits, he concludes that most of it is mere gesture and makes little or no difference to emissions. If this strikes you as a bit depressing, you’ve always got the cash savings to cheer you up again.
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