On 24/11/11 10:18, Mark Rogers wrote:
In the grand scheme of things I don't see it saving us any real money; the cost of the kit might be covered by savings we can make by changing our usage or fixing some problems we didn't know we had, but if we get anything more than that back it's unlikey to be a good return on the time taken to investigate it. If I'm honest, my motivation is more curiosity and playing with the data on my Linux box than it is cost or environmental savings. But who knows? Making some fairly simple efforts to reduce water usage actually made a substantial difference to our bills, so the same is probably true here too.
When my one actually bloody worked I did find some savings...I had an idea that the stack of computer equipment in the study was costing a bit, when when I saw it added onto a running total for the house to sit idle it woke me up pretty fast.
I could have done that with plug in meters sure...but not seen the impact it made on the overall consumption of the household in realtime.
Realtime is also the key..you could take meter readings and eventually work out the saving of moving to CFL lighting or unplugging an idle computer...with Energy Monitoring you can see it in realtime room by room as you make changes.
I wouldn't have seen the faulty fridge that was costing me a fortune because with a build in appliance I had neither the thought or the ease of plugging in a socket based monitor.
I wouldn't have seen the faulty/unused and amazingly power hungry TV booster in the loft because I didn't know it was there (last house was rented) that was costing me 20 quid a year to do nothing ! Only found it when trying to track down the last bit of power sink in a house where I was sure everything was unplugged....so that alone paid for the monitor....then I think eventually I managed to shave over 100W from my "idle" consumption with little to no effort or cost...good saving.