RefurbN16

Tag: Meters

  • Track Your Carbon Footprint with The Carbon Account

    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!

  • Fridge Freezer Temperature

    I picked up a bunch of thermometers this week for TTSN people to check their freezer and fridge temperature. These thermometers are cheap as chips (and apparently reasonably accurate – thanks WRAP) and could save you a tidy little sum if you’ve been overchilling your food. I’ve just popped one in the freezer compartment and it seems to be reading -19 degrees. According to Iceland (and they should know)…

    Star rating Location Temperature Storage
    * Ice box -6 degrees 1 week
    ** Ice box -12 degrees 1 month
    *** Ice box -18 degrees 3 months
    **** Freezer -18 degrees Long term

    So apparently I can store frozen food long term but I don’t really need the freezer compartment as I buy all my food fresh, in small quantities, and eat it straight away. But I can’t turn the freezer part off and leave the fridge part on.

    So what about switching the whole thing off? In winter I could get a cool box and stick it in a shady spot out on the balcony – you don’t want your food (or indeed beer) to be frozen and thawed as would have happened quite a lot this year so a cool box should provide a bit of a buffer.  In summer I think I’d need to switch it back on, but if I could switch it off for half the year…? It seems some are already trying it.

    Of course you don’t want to save CO2 by cutting your fridge or freezer consumption if your food is going to spoil and be wasted.

    I’ve stuck my fridge freezer on a plug in electricity meter to see what it consumes over 24 hours on its current setting. I’ll then increase the temperature and see what the difference is – empirical science going on right here, just for you lucky people!

    1st Results – OK over the last 24 hours my fridge got through 0.4kWh, very roughly suggesting consumption of 145kWh and 80kgCO2 per year. But I checked the temperature in the freezer compartment at one point and it was down to -14. This was towards the end of its off cycle and I’m guessing the -19 reading was taken somewhere around the end of the on cycle. I’ve cranked the thermostat from “3” to “4” and we’ll see what happens (I’m not even sure if it’ll make it colder or warmer at this point).

    2nd Results –  Consumption over 24 hours at the “4” setting was 0.54kWh, a 35% increase. Next I switched it up to “5” and consumption increased to 0.71kWh, a 30% increase again. I’ve now turned it down to “2” and we’ll see how it goes.

  • Measuring Electricity Consumption

    Keeping track of how much energy your home gets through is a very useful thing to do when you start to look at reducing your home’s carbon footprint. By measuring how much energy you get through you can accurately measure how much CO2 your home generates and you can also track the effects that energy efficiency measures have.

    The two energy inputs for most homes in N16 are, of course, electricity and gas. First up we’ll deal with measuring your electricity consumption.

    Start by digging out your old electricity bills going back as far as possible for the house you are in. If you can’t find them, they might be available on your account on your energy supplier’s website.

    Ignore any readings that have “E” or “Estimate” or similar beside a reading as these are guesses made by your energy supplier. By looking at only the customer readings or official meter readings or a combination of the two, you know you’re looking at the actual consumption over that period.

    Each unit represents 1kWh (kilowatt hour) of electricity consumption (I’ll be doing a post on the maths and physics behind energy, power etc soon – don’t worry it’s quite simple!)

    This historical bill data will give you a coarse picture of your electricity consumption – it’ll be low resolution but it’s something. You can take this data and work out average electricity consumption per day across a period and you might be able to see that your electricity consumption is generally a bit higher over the winter months than it is over the summer. But meter readings taken infrequently like this don’t give you a very good picture and you can do much better.

    The simplest and cheapest way of tracking your electricity consumption is to take a meter reading once a week and make a note of it. Even better, upload this information along with your historical meter readings to a website such as The Carbon Account or imeasure. These will automatically convert your electricity and gas meter readings into CO2. I use the Carbon Account as it’s a very nicely presented website and it also allows you to track your transport emissions.

    If you want to pay more detailed attention to your electricity consumption you can purchase clip on electricity meters. These are nifty little devices that clip on to one of the cables coming out of an electricity meter. The box measures the electricity flowing through the cable and transmits a signal to another box which you can take from room to room (mine sits by my TV).

    The accuracy of these devices is so so, maybe to 10W (Watts) or thereabouts, but the main purpose is to see how your home’s electricity consumption changes in real time as you turn things on and off and you can get an idea of how often your fridge’s cooling cycle kicks in and out.  Some people leave it by the door so they can easily see if something’s been left on. Don’t expect to be able to detect every device’s standby consumption with these – it’s really to highlight where the big hitters are.

    If you want to measure individual appliances more accurately then you’ll need a plug in electricity meter. These often display down to 0.1W, although again the accuracy of these can be a bit iffy so you shouldn’t read too much into the readings.  You can also leave them plugged in so that you can measure consumption over a day or a week (important if you’re measuring appliances that operate on a cycle like a fridge or washing machine).

    Electricity Monitor is a useful website that allows you to compare the features of a selection of clip on meters and then buy them. You only really need to have one in your home for a month or two before you’ll have a very good idea of where your electricity is going and then you can pass it on to a friend or neighbour.  Alternatively some libraries are now offering them on loan which is a magnificent idea – you can borrow them in Islington and I might see if I can persuade Stoke Newington library to look into it too.

    Simply measuring your electricity consumption won’t reduce it of course. To do that you need to change your habits – turn off the lights when not in use, don’t run the half empty washing machine, switch things off standby. Alternatively you might see that the old freezer in the corner is munching through the electricity or those last few light bulbs which you haven’t changed yet are getting through more electricity than you thought.

    By making simple changes such as these you can do a lot to cut electricity consumption, but knowing what to change is the first step.