Electricity Monitors

Caporegime
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Lake District
Does anyone know of an accurate electricity monitor (our Minim one is over 25% inaccurate) that you can connect to a Pc and use with Enio or similar?
 
Soldato
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8 Oct 2006
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Midlands
We have the Owl monitor. Very accurate as far as i have been able to discern. The new version also connects to the PC to download stored data. The old USB version had to be plugged in all the time which kind of missed the point!
 
Associate
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Kent, UK
If you happen to be an EON energy customer you can get a CurrentCost Envi (CC128) one free - we just received ours.

http://www.currentcost.com/product-cc128.html

Seems pretty accurate so far, and there are various software options to monitor and link to online services, although I have not had much chance to try them yet to see how good they are.

*edit* got sidetracked, and my reply was waaaay to slow...
 
Caporegime
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got an eon one, usnure how accurate it is but says we've used 450 kwh over the last 31 days, no wonder our bills are so high.

Well the British Gas supplied Minim one says we used 581Kwh in the past 30 days, so 1743Kwh over the last 90 days, but the actual bill says that we used 1284KWh in the last 90 days.

Massively inaccurate.
 
Caporegime
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I've just found the new EDF one:-
http://www.edfenergy.com/ecomanager-controller/

The main point is turning everything off from one button. Rather than running around turning everything off at the wall, pressing one button does appeal (also helps ensure you have got everything).

Does anyone know of any other monitors that can do this?

It's not 'everything', it's only everything connected to the supplied 3 transmitter plugs.
 
Associate
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Fair enough, for me seeing that my av & pc equipment is connected via gang plugs it would be near enough everything that would be on standby.

Fair point, however what you will probably find is that the power consumed by the things on standby overnight will make relatively little difference to your overall electricity bill.

The surprising things for me were just how much the halogen lighting in our kitchen, bathroom and some bedrooms costs to run :eek: So, whilst I'm not going to rip it all out and replace (yet), at least we make sure lights are switched off when there is nobody in the room.
 
Caporegime
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Fair point, however what you will probably find is that the power consumed by the things on standby overnight will make relatively little difference to your overall electricity bill.

The surprising things for me were just how much the halogen lighting in our kitchen, bathroom and some bedrooms costs to run :eek: So, whilst I'm not going to rip it all out and replace (yet), at least we make sure lights are switched off when there is nobody in the room.

Sky HD boxes are notorious for eating power in standby, I believe they use about 55-60watts !
 
Associate
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Sky HD boxes are notorious for eating power in standby, I believe they use about 55-60watts !

Shouldn't be anywhere near that. Sky quote 36W for an HD box when active, and 19 in Standby.

Either way, I accept that if you have a lot of boxes on standby then it could add up, but probably not to more than 150W total. This would equate to a saving of around £5 p/month saving if you switched them off for 12h/day, so the big energy savings are to be found elsewhere.
 
Caporegime
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Lake District
Shouldn't be anywhere near that. Sky quote 36W for an HD box when active, and 19 in Standby.

Either way, I accept that if you have a lot of boxes on standby then it could add up, but probably not to more than 150W total. This would equate to a saving of around £5 p/month saving if you switched them off for 12h/day, so the big energy savings are to be found elsewhere.

Maybe the new ones, but the first generation one are crap.
 
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