How I Reduced my Electricity Energy Consumption
A resident living in a Victorian terraced house in Trowbridge Road, BoA
In the middle of 2008 I received an electricity bill and was staggered to discover that they wanted to put my direct debit up to nearly £100 per month. There were only two of us in the house, and we thought we were quite energy efficient. We had already numerous compact fluorescent bulbs and turned lights and appliances off when not in use.
This bill equated to an annual usage of approximately 4500 KWh, which is way above the national average, and goodness only knows how much CO2! I wanted to reduce annual consumption down to around 2500 KWh, without sacrificing lifestyle.
In order to drastically cut your consumption, first it is necessary to know what what and how you are currently using. Next you need a budget from which you can purchase new items if necessary, the budget needs to be realistic. Implement the changes and finally measure the results.
After applying this technique and a budget of £500 we were able to reduce annual consumption 2700 KWh. What is more, based upon a unit price of 14p per KWh (realistic at the time) the payback period was 2 years.
Know What You Are Using
The first step into actively reducing your energy consumption is to know what you are using. To do this I’d recommend purchasing 2 energy monitors. One “Owl” type monitor that measures the whole house and one you can plug individual devices into to measure them.
Using the monitors measure everything. The TV, Settop boxes, cooker, fridge, freezer, microwave, PC’s, laptops, printers, lamps, ceiling lights, pond pumps, phone chargers, etc. Ideally you are looking for a “instantaneous” reading which is a single spot reading for the device – the monitors show this as how many watts/hour it is drawing. However some items such as fridges run infrequently, so measure these for 24 hours and divide the result by 24 to get an hourly average.
Whist measuring everything, estimate the number of hours each day the device is used for. Fridges etc. are 24 hours whereas a TV might be 4.
You should not estimate consumption.
Now you should have a list of all devices with their consumption per hour. You can then multiply the consumption by the hours it used to get the consumption per day.
Note here how I have put the TV down twice – once for in-use and the other for the rest of the day when it’s in standby. This is something you may wish to take note of, we always turn the TV off using the power switch. However, this model TV continues to draw power in this off state – yours may do the same!
Using the list, decide if the consumption measured for the device is excessive, using the published product consumption information should help here. Anything which you consider excessive is a candidate for replacement. In our case the freezer was drawing 2KWh per day, but it seemed excessive. Upon investigation I discovered that it had gone wrong.
After researching the market, I found a new freezer which matched the kitchen and was big enough. Always go for the most energy efficient A rated appliances you can afford that fulfil your other criteria. The new freezer drops the consumption down to 0.3 KWh per day.
The next step is to set a target consumption per device. Be realistic though in what you can achieve, but make it demanding. It is no use saying that you'll reduce the consumption of a TV down to 0, if you still want to watch it.
Be honest with yourself though, replacing a perfectly good appliance “just for the sake of it” may reduce your consumption, but there are environmental aspects to the production and disposal of goods too, only replace if the savings are really worth while.
Then it is a case of trying to achieve the targets, there are several methods of doing this; one is replacing devices with lower energy ones, for example using energy saving light bulbs. Another is to turn the device off when not actively in use.
This is how I achieved my targets:This is how I achieved my targets:
In essence to halve my energy consumption, although I spent money replacing white goods and light bulbs, the bulk was attained by unplugging/switching off the devices when they are not in use, which is of course free.
The EnviroLight LED lamps were a particularly good find. These LED GU10 halogen replacements provide room illumination unlike the majority of the LED bulbs which can be found in the like of B&Q which are “spot” lights. They are expensive at £12.50 each but they are supposed to last 25 years! The additional benefit of these from my perspective is that they run cold, I no longer burn my neck whilst cooking in the kitchen. They are available here http://www.bltdirect.com/product.php?pid=10653&cat=237&nm=Enviro-Light+G...
Once you have applied your measures to save energy, measure again to see how effective they were. Then repeat. It becomes a bit of a game.
