Energy Saving: Finding where you're wasting energy

After changing all the light bulbs in my house that I can to power saving light bulbs, I've started to think about other things in my house that could be taking up a lot of energy.

Obviously you can't save energy if you don't know how much you're using, so I got myself a Plug-In Mains Power & Energy Monitor. This little bit of kit allows me to monitor the power consumption of any device plugged into it. As well as telling you how many watts something is using, it also has a timer that can calculated how many KW/H an appliance is using.

As an experiment I started connecting it to different things around the house to get an idea of where I'm using the most power.

My PC with monitor came in at a reasonably good 125 watt, while it's not as good as some of these more modern low power PCs it's still not really that bad. The KW/H soon starts to rack up though beings my PC can be on for nearly 5-6 hours a day on average.

My TV downstairs comes in at about 90 watt. Because of where the plug for the TV is and the lengths of cables it wasn't that easy to place the power meter somewhere, where it was easy to see even with the use of extension cords, so I just took a quick look every so often and I'd say the average was around 90 watt. As you may or may not know, standard CRT based TVs and monitors vary the amount of power used depending on what colour pixels they are displaying (article), as far as I know this also happens with LCD and plasma screens but not to the same degree.

My kettle came in at 2 KW. Yes that's right 2 KW and that's a reasonably under-powered kettle, if you have one of those fast boil ones then it can go up to 3.5 KW just to boil some water. You could give the argument that a kettle only uses the power for a few minutes, but over the space of say a year that's going to soon add up.

By far the worst offender however was my tumble drier. Now the only reason I originally got a tumble drier was because I live in a small house and in the winter it's an absolute nightmare getting things dry properly because I have no room to hang anything. In the summer I always use the clothes line in the back garden to do all my drying so the tumble drier only gets used in the winter and weighting in at over 2.5 KW it's a good thing. I can easily polish off 4 KW/H worth of electricity a week drying clothes if not more.

My tumble drier is by far not the most energy efficient, but at the same time even a top quality tumble drier which can cost you more than a good washing machine sometimes, isn't that efficient either.

Just from the quick tests I did you can see that a lot of energy goes into heating of some kind in the home. Irons can be around 2 KW as well as things like hair driers and washing machine elements.

Beings I have gas central heating I won't be able to tell how much energy has gone into heating my house and water until I get my next bill, however I assume it will be a reasonable amount.

I think one of the best technologies that someone could come up with at the moment would be to make a highly efficient way of producing heat that could be scaled to fit all kinds of household devices. That truly could make a huge difference to energy consumption around the world.