Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Profiling energy usage in a household


Energy consumption in my parents house is about 300 kWh per month. We have replaced incandescent light bulbs couple of years from now and we are systematically replacing fluorescent lamps with LED lamps because they consume even less power that fluorescent. We are moving toward energy-saving technologies. We are using solar water heater instead of electric boiler and whole house is equipped with improved thermal insulation. We live in central Europe so in winter it is nothing exceptional when you see -20 Celsius degrees (-4 Fahrenheit).

Yesterday I did a little experiment. When everybody was sleeping I switched off freezer, all computers and TVs, by switching off I mean pulling a plug from a socket. I was wondering how much current do consume devices which are switched on all the time, this devices are:
-microwave oven with nice shiny LED clock display
-conventional electric oven with another shiny LED clock display
-wi-fi router and power-over-ethernet power supply
-amplifier for a TV aerial
-electric stove (it was of course on idle)
-vent hood in a kitchen

We use an old plain electricity meter without digital display so to make total current consumption I had to use stopwatch to measure how much time does it take for a wheel inside the meter to make a whole turn. It was 312 seconds. Considering that 120 turns correspond to a 1kWh I calculated that a total idle power consumption of mentioned devices was around 96W. That is much energy. 96W 24/7 is around 70kWh per month. Idling devices are responsible for a 23% of power on a electricity bill.



Yeah, now I simply have to find out which devices are responsible for a most of this 23% and simply switch them off as often as possible. This devices:
-wi-fi router and power-over-ethernet power supply
-amplifier for a TV aerial
are on an attic and they are not_so_easy_accessible, so to ease my experiments I used a remote controller to switch them off without going to the attic. When I will repeat whole house idle consumption measurement with couple of devices switched off I will easily find power consumption of this two first suspects. I took a look inside the remote receiver, it has got transformerless power supply and it consumes about 1/2W so it will not introduce considerable errors to my measurements.

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