| Forum Home | ||||
| PC World Chat | ||||
| Thread ID: 119025 | 2011-07-01 07:53:00 | Measuring the power usage of home appliances | braindead (1685) | PC World Chat |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 1213839 | 2011-07-03 03:16:00 | Easy as - You just clamp a small device around one of the leads going to or coming out of the meter. This plugs into a small transmitter. As you say, far better value the the others. Mine is mounted on the lounge wall, and at a glance can see consumption. At the moment costing 10.3 cents an hour (based on 28c per Kw) | Peter H (220) | ||
| 1213840 | 2011-07-03 08:03:00 | I bought one of these (sites.google.com) a while back. | Bobh (5192) | ||
| 1213841 | 2011-07-03 08:30:00 | Hi all, We keep getting steep power bills from Mercury Energy but in fact we don't know which ones are the power hungry appliances. It's time to take the bull by the horns and gather some facts on household usage. How can I best go about this without spending a fortune? I know there are gizmos you can plug into a mains socket and the appliance then plugs into the gizmo. I've also heard of clamp meters but I don't know how and where these are used. For example, how would we measure the consumption of a hot water cylinder which has no mains socket? Any advice welcome! Thanks Water and home heating are the biggest suspects. General appliances TV's computers etc usually equate to a fairly small percentage of your power usage. www.consumer.org.nz |
Battleneter2 (9361) | ||
| 1213842 | 2011-07-03 09:04:00 | without changing your usual usage habits. just note the meter readings at diff times of the day - overnight, morning, afternoon and evening .... then you can hone into the suspects. you could use the overnight as a baseline. by looking at your power bill invoice you can work out how much it would be. ie., it will show you what is the maintenance fee per day then how much is it per kW unit. if you wanna hone in more, do it hourly, additonal, what you could do is maybe spend an hour watching tv or what not at night after dinner so no kitchen activities with no heaters. not the start and and end values of that hour. compare it to with heaters for an hour .. and note the difference. maybe collude everyone to have a shower within an hour get the start and difference, then minus this off your "overnight" baseline, plus get people for that hour not to use the computer or tv or heaters ..... are you on the correct electricity plan? generally not much diff but if you have water with electricty, you can get a plan that does that, so power is a bit less $$ when you have water with it too, even if you had that but now you switched it to gas ... you can still do it as the old meter still has that - it's called composite meter or composite price plan. if you have a heat pump etc .. that hard wired to the mains .. so that gadget may not work. lastly, if they haven't recently changed your meter to the smart meters. you can request this yourself and pay the $100 or $150 fee .... the meter might be working a bit fast. |
Nomad (952) | ||
| 1213843 | 2011-07-03 09:19:00 | I bought one of these (sites.google.com) a while back. Is it any good? I see a similar item on jaycars website - product ID MS6115. Am thinking its worth trying to monitor power consumption in the office. |
Iantech (16386) | ||
| 1213844 | 2011-07-03 22:53:00 | Is it any good? I see a similar item on jaycars website - product ID MS6115. Am thinking its worth trying to monitor power consumption in the office. I bought this a while ago with the idea of measuring power usage of plug in power appliances. For example washing machines, electric jugs, microwave ovens and appliances on standby. As an example. I use the washing machine daily because it is easier to manage the drying of smaller loads of washing. I wanted to be able to figure out what savings I would make if I say did a load every few days. Unfortunately, because of my busy life style, I never got round to properly using it. This thread reminded me that I had it. |
Bobh (5192) | ||
| 1213845 | 2011-07-05 08:26:00 | Peter H - Just wanted to let you know I settled on this one: MAINS POWER MONITOR WIRELESS (wattsclever.com) from Jaycar. $190.00 inc gst and delivery. I think I may have got the last one until they restock. This model is about $70 more than their basic model (wattsclever.com). My reasoning is that more and easier to read info on the more expensive model is worth the extra money, and data can be uploaded to a pc via usb. Thanks for all your help! |
braindead (1685) | ||
| 1213846 | 2011-07-05 23:53:00 | Good to hear. I have found mine very useful over the years. You get to know what the reading should be at various times and if up a bit, check around. Mine shows if I have left the workshop lights on or similar. Enjoy | Peter H (220) | ||
| 1213847 | 2011-07-06 00:05:00 | The TV, DVD extra are only ever on standby for maybe a couple of hours in the evening, when we walk away from the computer if its going to be for more than 30 minutes they get shut down. During the day the only things on are the fridge, the freezer and the 2 bedside clocks. It makes a huge difference oh and changing to Just energy as well I saw a thing recently saying that the likes of a MySky box is bad news on the power consumption when not in use. |
mikebartnz (21) | ||
| 1213848 | 2011-07-06 00:22:00 | Get rid of the MySky box and save about $1 a week in power costs, get rid of Sky save $25 :-) | PaulD (232) | ||
| 1 2 3 4 | |||||