Measuring Your Home Energy Use

The average household in the United States will spend about $2,140 on energy costs in a year, according to the Alliance to Save Energy. Do you want to track the energy use in your home? The first step may be to you learn how to use your PG&E SmartMeterTM, if it has been installed. Perhaps you don’t trust PG&E’s SmartMeterTM or maybe yours hasn’t been installed yet. There are options.

If your PG&E SmartMeterTM has been installed, go to PGE.com and sign up for a PG&E account. It takes only a few minutes. Once you have created your account, there are tools that allow you to see your energy consumption by month, week, day or hour. It won’t tell you what appliances are using that energy but it’s a good step in helping you understand your energy consumption.

If you want to learn more, there are home power monitors that can help. The Energy Detective (TED) costs about $200, connects to the circuit breaker box and to your internet router. It will monitor, record and calculate the costs of the electricity you use and send that information to a small box with an LCD in your home. The monitor will also send the information to your computer, where using TED’s proprietary software will allow you to get greater detail. Again, it won’t tell you which appliances are using the energy, but the real time data will help you pinpoint where the energy is going. You can watch the usage spike as you wash clothes or turn on your air conditioner, for example.

A cheaper alternative that does give you information on specific devices’ energy consumption is a kilowatt meter, which measures the energy use of any device plugged into it. You plug the meter into a wall socket and then plug the device into the meter. The kilowatt meter can’t measure an overhead light or other devices hardwired into your home, but “it’s still a useful tool,” said Reuven Walder, a professional energy auditor in Rockville, Md. He sells a kilowatt meter for about $30 at his store, Ecobeco (see the site at Ecobeco.com). Walder said it might surprise you, for instance, just how many kilowatts your cable box uses — it can add up to $30 to $50 a year.

These are all great tools to help you understand and reduce your energy consumption. Just a little bit of your time can go a long way toward reducing your energy bill.

Source: Miami Herald