The Spare Bedroom
The smallest bedroom in the house contains a surprising amount of electrical kit for a room that isn't used that often. In here we have two printers, some wireless broadband kit, camera charger and some iPod speakers all permanently switched on.
Changes Made
The ceiling light is a energy saving 11w bulb and has been for as long as any of us can remember, so no change was made there.
The fax machine is advertised as one way to contact the web hosting business we run so it cant really be switched off. Fortunately it doesn't really use a lot of electricity costing about £4.70 a year to run.
Our magic energy monitor told us that individually the other stuff in the room only uses a small amount of electricity. Adding it all up show that it costs us just over £20 a year to run if left switched on all the time.
To reduce this we put some of the thing's onto a timer so they are on during the day and off at night. Those things are:-
-
Both Printers
-
The Wireless Print Server
-
iPod speakers
-
The digital Camera battery charger
Estimated Savings
The timer is set to be on between 7.30am and 9.30pm meaning everything connected to it is switched off, not using power for 10 hours every day.
Expected savings are about £6.50 per year. Not a massive amount I hear you say but that is a reduction in electricity usage of 32%. If we can achieve a similar figure through out the rest of the house then that adds up to a lost of money.
Go to "Reducing Our Electricity Consumption Part 5 - The Garage"
What else we plan to do?
-
Look at ways to off set the CO2 produced by our cars.
-
Look at ways to reduce our gas consumption.
-
Look at ways to reduce our electricity consumption.
-
Look at ways to reduce our water consumption.
-
Work out what our Carbon Footprint is after we have done the above.
-
Find out how to recycle more and monitor just how much we do.