In a post on measuring electricity consumption I wrote back in December, I briefly touched on a fantastic website called The Carbon Account and thought I’d go into a bit more detail about it because it’s really very good.
This is a dead easy to use carbon monitoring website that allows you to track your carbon emissions from gas and electricity consumption in the home along with car and flight emissions.
It displays your carbon footprint for the last year in a neat little chart to which you can add notes to flag up changes that you have made to your home or lifestyle or any times when your house was unoccupied. Unfortunately it only shows your carbon footprint for the last year (it would be great if the developers could fix this at some point).
There is even a social networking element to it so you can see how your friends’ energy consumption has changed and congratulate them on the steps they’re taking to reduce their emissions.
You don’t even need to do any conversions of your gas meter readings into kWh (something I’ll touch on soon) as it does it all for you. All you need to do is input the actual meter readings. It literally takes two minutes to take your electricity and gas readings and add them to the website.
When you first get an account, it asks you a few questions about your home and make a stab at what your annual carbon footprint might be and gives you a flat graph which doesn’t vary over the year.
As it takes a while to build up a profile of meter readings, I would suggest digging up any old bills you have lying around and adding the readings from them. Just do the “actual” or “customer” readings because the estimated readings are usually dodgy. If you don’t have your old bills, see if you can get your energy supplier to send you your past meter readings or check out their website as they may have a section where you can download your old bills.
Then take a gas and electricity meter reading on a regular basis, ideally each week, so that you can see how your energy consumption changes. You can even set up an email reminder to give you an e-nudge every week.
Bear in mind that the outside air temperature is a big driver of your heating demands so it’s quite possible that you might do some energy efficiency work and you don’t see the drop you were expecting to – it might just be that it’s been cold outside. You will still have made a saving because your energy bill would have been considerably higher than if you hadn’t done that measure.
Taking weekly readings is a good thing because it allows you to do some calculations which remove these temperature effects, another topic that I will cover in the future.
There’s plenty of information about how it works on the Carbon Account website, along with the calculation methodology. One thing to note is that if you’re getting funny results for your gas meter, it might be because it measures in 100s of cubic feet. Check out the info about this here.
So set up a Carbon Account right now and start monitoring. If you don’t know what your carbon emissions are, you won’t know how far you’ve cut them!