Selfsufficientish.com

Big Al wrote:

Potter's Farm wrote:We charge our phone in the car and have never charged it in the house but i wanted to show our 14 year old daughter how much it costs!!

Can you not get one of those energy meters like the owl which shows useage costs in the republic?

I have such a meter, and a phone charger is far too small a load for it to register at all. They cost virtually nothing to run - we're talking a few (<5) watts when charging, and less than half a watt when disconnected. You can run a phone charger (actually charging) for something like 10 days on just 1 kWh.

Folks looking for comparison points might be interested to know that I average a bit under 5kWh of 'leccy per day - and I brew all my own beer using an electric boiler and I'm currently running 3 fridges. I have a gas hob and I also use gas for heating and hot water, but the oven is electric.

Been looking through some old emails and saw this topic. Anyone still keeping an eye on their leccy and or gas consumption??

I wouldn't mind joining in if you want to get it started again.

good call, I'm up for it.......

Go on then,

I'll restart it !!

I think the basic idea was to read your meters every week on the same day and log in your own spreadsheet or on here what you have used in the week.
Then if you, or someoone else thinks it's high then ideas can be discussed as to how it can be reduced if indeed that is required.

Since doing daily recordings I've reduced my electric (from a bad memory) something like 10,000 Kwh units a year to less than 1800 PA today.

I think we should do this too. Our house has all been rewired with a new electricity box. The old one had a magnet or something on it to make it slower. So its all genuine now. I have an energy question actually, maybe ill start a new thread.

I read the electricity meter today, so here's a starting point: 2543

I also plugged the little monitor into the computer, which surprised me by downloading about a year's worth of data. How did it manage that? It's had no batteries for most of that time! Still, the readings matched the meter, so the data must have been stored in the little clip thing on the wire. We've had it for 18 months, and its most valuable use was to reveal that our meter was over-reading by about 50%. Persuading the electricity company to check that out was fun!

Anyway, I can see that for the year Sep 2011 to Aug 2012 we used 1953 kWh, and that we used quite a lot more this summer than last summer.

Our biggest users of electricity are the shower and the washing machine. Heating and hot water are wood-fired (one day we'll get solar panels and switch the shower over to the main hot water system too). The cooker runs off gas, but I can't include gas meter readings because the big tank in the garden just has a dial showing percentage full, and it's been 'about 35%' for ages. We also have an electric immersion heater, room heater and tumble dryer, all of which get occasional use. Our electric kettle developed a leak recently, so we've started using the camping kettle on the hob. It has a whistle