Power plays from “The Economist”:
WHEN a car has a fuel-efficiency gauge—a continuous display on the dashboard showing the rate of fuel consumption—it tends to promote frugal driving. Trying to use as little fuel as you can, by driving more smoothly and being a little less heavy on the accelerator, can even become a game of sorts. Nissan, a Japanese carmaker, has calculated that fuel-efficiency gauges can reduce fuel consumption by an average of 10%, so it has decided to put them in all its cars.
What if you did the same thing to houses? A variety of products can provide real-time information about electricity consumption. Working out how much energy a house is using is harder than with a car, because electricity meters are generally hidden away in cupboards or cellars, and many people find them hard to understand. So an easily understood real-time read-out, akin to a car’s fuel-efficiency gauge, could make a big difference.
The simplest such devices can be plugged in between an appliance and a wall socket, to display how much electricity the appliance is using. Plug in your toaster, hairdryer or radio and turn it on, and you can see how much power it consumes.
After you have set up the device you get the first shock: why is the house using so much electricity? Walking around and switching things off soon reveals where savings can be made: lights left on during the day, a television the children are not watching and a surprising number of power supplies keeping themselves warm while the things they are connected to are in “standby” mode. It is hard to get a house down to zero. There’s always a fridge, a freezer and forgotten things, such as a television-signal amplifier somewhere in the attic, or things you would rather not admit to (the dehumidifier keeping the classic car dry). Having switched things off, the second shock comes when you walk around turning things on. A washing machine, tumble dryer, dishwasher and electric oven produce alarming figures. And the oft-repeated advice about only boiling as much water as you need in the electric kettle makes sudden sense when you see your electricity consumption jump by 2.5kW.
The first step in reducing your carbon footprint, and your utility bill, is knowing where your money is being spent - AWARENESS. Simple steps to reduce your energy use (Unplugging when not is use…) will help you reduce your carbon footprint, and stop that electric meter from burning a hole in your pocket.
