May 12th 2007, Our House, Derby
Having both worked for an electricity company in the past, we had a pretty good idea of what uses a lot of electricity.
Basically anything that heats things up, like an immersion heater, fire, washing machine, kettle, tumble dryer will use a lot of power.
Things used occasionally
Our house is full of this kind of stuff! It would take an age to individually record how much electricity they use and, as this stuff isn't in constant use, would be very difficult to estimate just how often they are used. Without this info we cant say how much of our annual consumption they account for.
Lighting
Lighting proved to be a bit tricky. Its impossible to connect the ceiling light to the Energy Monitor unless you started changing wiring around! However there’s a simple bit of maths you can use to work out how much electricity a bulb uses.
Each unit of electricity is made up of 1000 watts, known as a Kilowatt Hour (kWh) and each bulb has a wattage rating. The wattage rating tells you how many watts the bulb uses every hour its on. Therefore a 100w bulb uses 100w every hour. If you divide a kWH by the wattage rating the result is the number of hours that bulb needs to be on before it uses 1 unit of electricity. In this example 10 hours (1000w divided by 100w = 10hours)
Most of our ceiling lights tended to have low energy light bulbs fitted, nearly all the lamps did not.
Things used regularly
This is were the big electricity users were found so the biggest potential for savings must be here as well?
We found every TV, video, DVD player, CD player etc in the
house is left on standby when not in use and we our tumble dyer would be on
every day, even if it was bright sunshine outside!