How to Monitor Electricity Use | This Old House

Paul you're an energy efficiency expert we've worked with you in the past and we've asked you back because we need you to help us think about how we monitor the electrical use in the house how do we do that well you can start by looking outside your house at the electrical meter okay and what I've got here is a 60 watt incandescent bulb up to that meter and the trick is to watch the spinning dial if that is spinning we are drawing electricity and it's actually spinning relatively fast right now I've got a 15 watt compact fluorescent bulb on the other side look at that slow down and so I guess that's the trick we want to get that wheel to spin as slowly as possible with the same output exactly so in this case technology has come to our rescue and we can use about a quarter of the power to give us the same amount of light all right so how do we actually monitor the usage of individual appliances throughout the house well moving inside the house we can use any one of these electrical meters and these are individual appliance meters they each are they work about the same they have slightly different features but essentially you plug your appliance into the meter and you plug the meter into the wall and they will tell you how much power or dollars that appliances using plug my refrigerator into this device and it'll tell me how much power and what that refrigerator is costing you to run exactly okay so that's really good information I guess the downside is you either have to have one of these for every appliance you want to measure in the house or when you're done measuring the refrigerator you unplug this and you plug it into your say washing machine right so the next thing that you might want to think about is a whole house electrical meter and there's a couple of different devices out on the market now as well so this for example will clip onto your power meter outside and there's a little optical reader that will sense how fast that dial is spinning so it actually watches that dial spin and then what it sends the information to this monitor exactly and this monitor goes inside the house you can carry it around with you turn things on and off see what what it changes on your power or dollar consumption gadgets this is a wireless version right here just work the same way pretty much the same way except that this clips on to the wires inside your panel gadget so in this case it's also good information about the whole house but this unit won't tell you exactly what just the refrigerator is drawing and whether or not the refrigerator is a power hog right exactly now combine these technologies and we have next level of whole house energy management and monitoring home systems what are we looking at here this is a breaker box and we've got current sensors that clip on to each wire actually so we monitor each circuit individually so here's the circuit for the washer machine and as this washing machine draws load the sensor reads that and sends the information we're over to this power management box that gathers all of the data from the circuits and sends it to the Internet where you can look at all of that data on your computer so look at that alright we've actually got a live hookup to a real house here that's using 3122 watts you can look at that Spode ometer on the left side there oh and they're just changed pretty quickly so that is actually a real-time reading of what's going on in the house that's right so something somebody just came home and turned something on probably and then over here to the right that is a list of all the circuits and appliances that are on clothes dryers on the mudroom and sink oil boiler all the way down to ends with the home office okay Kevin scroll down to the bottom of the page and you'll see that pie chart and we can zero in on any one of those end uses so this is the usage over the last 30 days and there it is the refrigerator used about eight percent the kid's bedroom and some circuits in the basement 19 percent in the home office that looks like the biggest at almost twenty eight 28.2% that's right the biggest user here but I have to tell you I have this equipment installed in my house and my power usage jumped one day I could see that very clearly and I scrolled through all the pieces of this graph and I discovered that my refrigerator was using twice the power that it normally does and I trouble shot that back to a bad defrost coil replace that for twenty dollars my power uses back where it needs to be so I can click on an individual slice of this pie I want to click on the Home Office here and it'll give me detailed information of just the home office exactly oh well yes I'm looking at the chart and here it is at about 5:50 p.m. there's a spike so the homeowners come home and they turn on the computer the computer screen their printer and such and that explains this spike here right now take a look at early in the morning we've got a 551 time marker there but before that we can be pretty sure nobody's in the office they're probably still asleep it's four o'clock in the morning no one's in the office yet there's still looks like about a minimum of a hundred and fifty watts being used in that office like times santim power to me so phantom power is this idea that even though you've turned things off they're still drawing a load exactly you turn your computer off but the printer is still on or the modem is still on and that's still using electricity right and in this case it's 150 watts it's like leaving 150 watt light bulb on all the time so this helps us monitor it how do we actually manage that what we do about phantom load well we've got some more technology fairly simple to use let's take a look at it okay power strips huh right pretty simple to use plug all your peripherals in here when you're done using your equipment you turn it off guy everything goes off so the only problem is that you've got to crawl behind the desk and turn this off that's right so let's get a little more sophisticated we've got a timed power strip now again you plug everything into this strip and you program your timer to turn the home office off at midnight for example everything goes off while you're sleeping on you have to think about it all right but there's always something that I don't want to stop drawing at phantom low because I don't have to reboot it or reset it every day that's right so you might want to consider a controlled power strip and these use a controlled outlet to turn these outlets off so for example your computer's plugged in here and your monitor and printer are plugged in here when your computer goes off these outlets are switched off through an internal control no phantom load can come out of those outlets into the red ones here those are always hot so your fax machine for example might get plugged into there oh that's great so pretty intelligent all right so lots of good information on how to monitor and most importantly how to manage our electrical load Paul thank you very much thank you you

Channel: This Old House

Views: 193,701

Rating: 4.8732719 out of 5

Keywords: This Old House, Ask This Old House, DIY, Home Improvement, DIY Ideas, Renovation, Renovation Ideas, How To Fix, How To Install, How To Build, Electricity, Energy, Do It Yourself, Power, Warming, money saving, budget, Climate, Change, Money (The Office), paul scheckel, energy efficiency, Green, home renovation ideas, diy home improvement, diy home projects, home renovation ideas on a budget

Id: D1jtcr2bXmI

Length: 6min 22sec (382 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 10 2014