Plug in Electricty Consumption Meter Advice

EffBee

EffBee

EffBee

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Joined
9 Dec 2006
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1,323
Hi all.

My last quarterly electricity bill was £597. I need to know where all that money is going. £50.00 per week, £7.00 per day seems like a lot to me.

Can anyone recommend from personal experience a decent meter that I can use to measure the power usage of my domestic electrical equipment - from heavy power devices like toaster, kettle, washing, oil filled radiator through various PCs, firewalls, routers, printers and consoles which are on most of the time, to lightweight stuff like tablelamps.

I will need to figure out how to go from the power consuption of the device to a price - but if anyone can give me a quick way to work it out, then that would save me a little messing around.

Finally - without being nosey, is anyone prepared to comment on how much per quarter they spend on power in a 3 bed semi with a family of four.

Many thanks.

:)
 
Just get any of the bay, can be had for dirt cheap.

I expect washing machine and oil heater will be the most exppensive. How id your water heated?

Things like pcs, consoles, tv's don't cost a lot on there own but in a house of 4 if they are left on can soon mount up.
 
Thank you for your answers people.

Another problem I know I have is with light bulbs. My wife has an obsession with bright room lighting and puts 100w bulbs in everywhere. I tend to go around replacing them with 60s. But on-one in my family ever turns the damned lights off when they leave room. You can probably see my house from space at night :)

Time to put in some low energy bulbs if I can find some that are acceptable light quality compared to tungsten filament.
 
i put low energy bulbs in all the rooms in my flat, besides the bathroom & hallway (hardly ever used and it'd be a pain to wait for them to charge up

the gf moans, but i think i read somewhere that roughly 6x saving bulbs = 1 100w bulb
 
bledd. said:
i put low energy bulbs in all the rooms in my flat, besides the bathroom & hallway (hardly ever used and it'd be a pain to wait for them to charge up

the gf moans, but i think i read somewhere that roughly 6x saving bulbs = 1 100w bulb
Click to expand...

Do this and you will pretty much cancel out any power your PC uses. I have replaced all mine with the low energy bulbs and there just as bright and last years. They take a couple of mins to reach full brightness, no big deal. (we got the bulbs for free, was an offer in the paper or off our supplier im not sure)

Wish I could get one to fit the bathroom though.

RE: the op

That well known electronics retailer has the energy meters your after for 9.99, shows everything you need to know. Watts, Kw/h used etc....
My PC pulls circa 300watt, shame the aircon pulls 1500watt :o

5 people in the house, we use about £2.50 a day on a payg meter.
 
Yeah kettles and washing machines use quite a bit, go stick the washer on and then go watch how fast the doodah spins round (you know the dial thing with the black mark on it, it bloody flys). :D

Ive counted how long it takes the black mark to get round with just my PC on, only takes a couple of seconds or so less.
 
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My kitchen light fitting takes two bulbs, and I switched from 2 x60w bulbs to 2x14w energy savers, and it was far to bright, had to downgrade to 9w energy bulbs!.

Energy bulbs in the sittingroom (2x9w lights a big room easily).

I like the curly spiral bulbs, as they have an incredibly even light. Just make sure you get "warm / soft" light versions. These give a good approximation of normal lightbulbs in terms of light colour.

Spirals seem to take less time to "warm" up than some of the larger older designs too. Bright enough at startup for use in my hallway anyway.

Considering a low end PC uses around 140W, and even quite an extreme quad core, single high end GPU system is struggling to use 300W. Yet a lightbulb can draw 100W!. Changing the bulbs can really help.

They even make dimmable energy saving bulbs now (just a little hard to find them)

Washing machine uses a lot of power to heat the water (if its a modern cold water washer it will be efficient a, but still uses lots of power) washing at 30 degrees can save a few quid though.

I have one of those energy meters, £10 from online auctions. Great device, and seems more than accurate enough.

A high end Stereo can use quite a lot of power when its turned on, even if its not "playing" Mine uses 180W to do nothing but keep the circuits "hot". TV's on standby though, these thats pretty much a myth at least with newer TV's. My old 28inch CRT used 15W on standby, but my 42inch plasma uses 0.5W on standby. For the convenience of remote operation 0.5W is perfectly acceptable :)
 
I'm with Scottish Power's Online Energy Saver account now, previously with N Power. We have a three bed house, with the usual washer/dryer, three kids who refuse to turn things off behind them, 2x power showers, four TVs, three PCs and a laptop (most of which run 24x7)...

Our monthly electric bill is around £50 to £60. So I'd definitely check into yours and make sure you've given them ACTUAL readings and they're not relying on estimated readings ;)
 
Strange, the two of us, with one PC on all the time, 42" RP TV on all evening, and a standard 60w bulb on all night, however, heating and cooking is taken care of by gas, we only pay £20/m.
 
3 bed house, 2 people, gas heating and cooking. PC, media centre, tv, laptops. - £90 quarter.

I do turn things off at the plugs, energy saving bulbs, and just got a power monitor from MM to moan at the missus a bit more.

OP: Electric is really easy to work out, compared with gas - look at your bill and find the KwH charge, the power monitor thing you get off the bay should give you a reading in KwH. Times them together, and add in any standard (daily) charge, and bobs your uncle.
 
I brought one of these: "Ecosaver Plug In Power Energy Monitor Meter" for £8 and it is brilliant.

You tap in how much you pay for 1KW of electricity (this is on your bill) and it tells you exactly how much money the device you have plugged into it is costing to run.

It also has a running clock meter type thing built in so if you leave the device (say your PC) running for 6 hours it tells you exactly how much it has cost for those six hours so that you can work out an average per hour, this is very handy because of course a PC is constantly changing the watts it is drawing based on what you are doing on it.
 
for a 60w lightbulb to be on 24/7 with a cost of say 15p/kWh would cost just under 22p per day.

a computer on 24/7 which consumes 300w would cost £1.08 per day.

things on standby would also mount up, you can get devices that when you press a button switches off so anything plugged into it wont be on standby.

my dad rewired his computers so that the router/phone/NAS was plugged into one extension and everything else was in another, he swithced the other off at the plug when finished and we noticed a big difference
 
i'll try and find my power meter plug thingy this weekend, it's in my mum's house somewhere

i'll do a few tests of electrical appliances :p
 
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