How I Save Money with a Smart Meter

hello there so I've just had an energy smart meter fitted and it's already saving me money so in this video I'm gonna show you how the smart meter works talk a little bit about the pros and cons of having one show you how I am using it to save money and something quite interesting really how the smart meter showed me that one of my devices is maybe broken but at the very least incredibly energy inefficient so let's get on so I'm with Eon energy supplier and they came and fitted this beautiful smart meter even if you don't actually use it to save money look how attractive this is I mean it's a modern piece of technology the bloke who fitted this said to me it costs about 2 pounds a year to have it on so everybody's going to say how much electricity does the smart meter use very very little I'll quickly go through some of the features I don't know why's pressing the screen because the screen itself isn't actually touchscreen there are these buttons down the bottom so there's a button that says now if you press that it tells you how many watts of power you are using at this very moment it's costing 2 pence an hour which is very reasonable this will actually tell you your expense as well so so far today I've used no gas and it's cost me nothing because I haven't had a bath yet and in terms of gas and electricity I've spent 24 pence and I can actually I believe click the back button see that I said I spend fifty six pence yesterday and sixty six pence the day before I watch television and you know used a lot more power basically but anyway let's click back to now 124 Watts seems quite high actually incidentally if you're not using LED bulbs then you should be this is an Ikea lamp and bulb in there this is going to go from 125 watts to 132 it's a seven or eight watt bulb if this was an incandescent bulb it would be using at least 40 watts I'll show you in a while how you can actually work out what that actually costs because who cares about the watch really it's the cost to you that's important I don't if you can see on the camera but there's a green light here that's highlighted this means that the energy consumption is low at the moment if this meter goes up if he goes up above a certain point then an orange light comes on and if it goes very very high then the red light comes on in terms of the other features there's like a home button so you can see your usage for the day as I say you can go through each day you can also go through by week month year which is pretty good and there's a lot of settings in there as well you can set budgets and things I'm not really interested in the budget thing what I'm more interested in is the fact that you can turn on a device when it says 123 wait a few seconds and it goes up by 7 watts so we know how much energy this light uses so just to quickly demonstrate to you the power of LED bulbs this went up by 7 watts let's now go into my kitchen let's turn on this light these are three halogen spotlights 207 watts is absolutely rocketed up so obviously I would be a bit stupid named see the cost has already gone up by one P per hour there which may not seem that much but if you've got incandescent bulbs or halogen bulbs everywhere in your home and you're not using LED ones and you're leaving them on all the time these things are going to be costing you tens if not hundreds of pounds per year combined so let's quickly rush back and turn this light off incidentally I've just had these light switches changed at these sort of brushed metal ones do you like them I wanted the polished ones but I thought that the fingerprints would show up let's try another thing this is very interesting everybody knows that televisions use power even when they're off and I'm going to demonstrate that to you currently we're at 123 watts let's turn the power on so this is before the televisions even come on okay let's go around and yeah we've gone up to a hundred and seventy four so all of that stuff is about 50 watts even when it's off so I turn that off in the evening it's quite surprising isn't it and half of the reason for this is because this TV is old they've actually changed kind of power consumption rules now in the European Union at least televisions and things are much more energy-efficient this TV is I think nearly 15 years old new televisions now use about half a watt of power when they're on standby so it's much less of an issue for brand new appliances but it's very interesting to know and people are a bit snobby about smart meters oh I know how much energy I use you don't can you get a smart meter you've got no idea how much power your mobile phone is using when it's charging or your portable Hoover one of the very interesting things actually is that kettle maybe this is really obvious but as you've got any water in it so obviously a kettle has got like an element in it and it heats up the water and not surprisingly if you turn the kettle on there we go it's gonna boil any second this is a little bit frightening at the moment assist oh it's gone up to three point one three kilowatts costing 55 pence an hour now if you've got an immersion heater in your house it's basically a giant kettle is going to be costing you a fortune so yeah it's worth bearing in mind that some appliances just use loads and loads of power and may not know that until you get a smart meter there are also smaller devices which may be a little bit surprising so for example the broadband router and my security camera system here okay I could these off when I go out by turning these off I can see that they actually only use a watt or two each so it's not a lot over the course of a year I might as well just leave them on people don't like smart meters because they're convinced that a smart meter is going to cost you more money in the long run I haven't found that yet to be honest ask your energy supplier say is my smart meter going to cost me money because they're not allowed to lie to you the only way I've heard that they can cost you money is if you go onto a an energy tariff that's maybe a smart meter energy tariff where they could end up costing you charging you more for the evenings and weekends which is obviously when you're most likely to be at home if you've got a normal day job so yeah just be a bit careful of that I've got a fixed normal energy tariff that's the same in the morning the evening and the night so by having a smart meter it just allows me to control or monitor my power consumption and turn off the devices accordingly I've also got a time capsule thing down here actually it's an airport extreme with a hard drive attached to it so the time capsule uses it seems about six watts but I decided that I would turn it off when I'm not using it I only use it to back things up what's the point in having six watts of power running continuously basically by turning off every device in turn in your home it allows you to systematically work out the power consumption of each item in your house and it allows you to sort of stop and think do I need this device on all the time do I need it on when I'm not here how much is it going to be costing me and so the way you work there now apparently there's a number of watts your energy supplier probably charges you in terms of kilowatt hours our cost per kilowatt hour to convert to kilowatt hours you the Watts by a thousand 270 watts is 0.27 kilowatts and my energy supplier charges me something like eighteen and a half pence per kilowatt hour ok so that would be 18 and a half pence times zero point two seven that is the cost of my usage for one hour so obviously if I wanted to work out the cost over the course of a year I need to multiply it by 24 because there are 24 hours in a day and then I need to multiply it by 365 because there are 365 days in a year and that tells me that cost at 270 watts for a year's energy I've saved this till last because it's the most interesting thing but let's turn everything off that isn't essential and my smart meters dropping a bit we're down to 193 watts now obviously these fluctuate a bit because there are some quite big appliances in my place that are permanently on namely the fridge and freezer but these can drop lower but generally this reads about 125 watts that is my sort of base level when the fridge and freezer both sort of have reached their desired temperature he can go down to about 35 watts but it's usually about 125 this is pretty high at the moment but let me show you something quite interesting I'm gonna do what I said I shouldn't do and turn off my freezer now let's go and have a look so my freezer is at its minimum about a hundred watts of power a hundred watts a hundred divided by a thousand is 0.1 0.1 times 24 is I don't know I'll put it on the screen but essentially I've done the calculation and yeah it's costing me about a hundred and fifty pounds I think over 150 pounds a year for that freezer now that freezer I think is about 20 years old it's noisy I think there are leaks in the seal around the edge it's before white goods were really made to be more energy efficient so that freezer is costing me a fortune I've calculated that that freezer is nearly a thousand kilowatt hours a year a freezer from a from a shop at the moment seems to have a kilowatt hour usage of about a hundred and eighty so that's about five times worse than a new freezer so what I've done based on this is I've gone out and bought a brand new more efficient freezer and I'm gonna replace it and I estimate that in less than two years I will pay for the new freezer the new freezer doesn't need defrosting because it's got an auto defrost function it'll look nicer because it's brand new and shiny it'll be less noisy it'll keep my things frozen I know that it won't go wrong but mainly it's going to use much less power and save me money after two years so this is how I better turn the freezer back on actually had night this is how I used my smart meter to save me money I've become a little bit obsessed with it to be honest I've only had it a couple of days but I'm always checking it to see why it's up I can go around the house then and turn things off and get it low again it'll save me money in the long run I'm certain of it now I think even if you're not particularly technically minded all you've got to do is try and get that number as low as possible without obviously destroying all the food in your fridge and freezer so yeah that's how I use my smart meter from Eon here in the UK do let me know down below if you've got a smart meter whether or not this is made you think twice about it give me a thumbs up if you enjoyed it and I shall see you next time for another video

Channel: Dr Jake's Very British Reviews

Views: 30,575

Keywords: How I save money with a smart meter, how to lower your electric bill, How to reduce power consumption using a smart meter, less power smart meter, smart meter save money, Using a smart meter to save money, save money, Using my smart meter to save money, using a smart meter, my smart meter saved me money, smart meter, save energy smart meter, save money with a smart meter, how to lower your power bill, how i use my smart meter to save money, how to use a smart meter, drjn

Id: abb_hW0Yag8

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 03 2019