Will Anderson: The Green House
How much electricity do you waste at home? A new meter reveals the shocking truth
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Your support makes all the difference.Which of the following wastes the most energy: a) leaving a TV on standby, b) overfilling your kettle, or c) not turning your computer off at the wall socket?
In our increasingly energy-conscious world, questions like this ought to be easy for anyone to answer. Yet the information we get about the power we burn in our homes remains scandalously meagre - user-friendly "smart meters" have been talked about for years but are still a rarity. Fortunately, however, you can now buy easy-to-install products that will help you grasp the power-consuming patterns of your domestic lifestyle and so enable you to make energy- and money-saving changes.
The Electrisave wireless electricity monitor is a great place to start ( www.electrisave.co.uk, 0113 253 4091). This LCD display gives a clear reading of the overall real-time power consumption of your home so you can see at a glance how much electricity you are burning and the immediate effects of turning lights and appliances on and off. It also calculates the money you are spending and the kilograms of carbon that you are launching into the atmosphere. With it, you'll soon get a feeling for the effects of your daily interactions with all your domestic switches and buttons.
If you want a more detailed picture of the power consumed by individual appliances, you need a portable socket meter. This couldn't be easier to use: you plug the meter into the mains socket then plug the appliance into the meter which then displays the power being drawn. You will be hard-pushed to find one of these on the high street but they are available by mail order for around £25 (see www.maplin.co.uk for the Plug-in Mains Power and Energy Monitor).
I can guarantee that you will be surprised by what you find. With so much attention given to turning televisions and other electronic goods off, rather than leaving them on standby, you might assume that "off" means "off". But it doesn't. For example, I use a laptop computer at home but still have my old energy-guzzling desktop in a corner. I was shocked to discover just what an inefficient beast the desktop is: even when the computer and monitor are physically turned off, they continue to draw 31 watts from the wall (precisely what the laptop consumes when it is on and in use). Similarly my CD player only uses nine watts when it is operational but quietly burns seven watts when the box, but not the plug, is turned off.
You may now have guessed the answer to my opening question. With the information from my meter, I can calculate and compare the 24-hour power consumption of each action. As the confusing kilowatt-hour is the work of the devil, I am using the basic unit of energy, the joule, instead (one watt is a rate of energy consumption of one joule per second). Our new integrated digital television has an admirable one-watt standby so if left in this mode for 24 hours it wastes 86,400 joules. Our kettle demands a stinking 2,100 watts so if it stays on for an extra 30 seconds due to overfilling, we waste 63,000 joules per boil. Four brews per day means a total of 252,000 joules wasted. But if I fail to turn the desktop computer off at the socket I will waste a staggering 2,678,400 joules in 24 hours - twice what my A-rated fridge will demand over the same period.
The lesson is clear: wherever possible turn off electronic goods at the socket, unless you are confident that the "off" button really does what it ought to. And the message to all electronics manufacturers is even clearer: sort it!
Will Anderson's 'Diary of an Eco-builder' is published by Green Books at £14.95 ( www.greenbooks.co.uk)
* GREAT BUY
"One-click" intelligent mains extension lead. Plug your computer and peripherals into this extension lead and the power to all of them will automatically be cut whenever your computer is turned off. Can also be used with multi-box hi-fi systems. £29.99 from Maplin ( www.maplin.co.uk).
* WEBSITE OF THE WEEK
www.40percent.org.uk. A fascinating, in-depth, academic study that shows how carbon emissions from homes in the UK can be reduced by 60 per cent.
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