I installed a whole house electricity monitor in my home about 6 weeks ago to show me exactly how much electricity in kilowatt hours (kWh) we’re using at any one time. It is installed at the electric box in our utility room and has a wireless digital display that we keep in our kitchen. It has allowed us to better understand how and when we use our electricity and that knowledge has made it easier to cut our usage.
The digital display
It can be linked to Google PowerMeter, an application that allows you to log in to your account via the web or a smart phone and actually see how much electricity your home is using at any one time. It’ll graph it in two hour increments, by day and by week. You can export the data to a spreadsheet and dig a little deeper too. Below are some things I found in our own house.
Sunday was the day we use the most electricity on average. We’re usually doing laundry (we have an electric dryer), cooking (electric oven) and cleaning (using the vacuum cleaner). Not surprising Saturday is the day we use the second-most electricity as we tend to be home more during the day. The weekdays are obviously less though there’s quite a bit of disparity.
When looking at all the data, you can see that we’ve got quite a bit of variation. Our lowest day we used 8.4 kWh and we used as much as 21.6 kWh one day! Overall, our bills are down 39% when compared to last year. As a customer of the most expensive electricity provider in the state (MG&E), that’s amounted to a significant savings in our bills.
Remember — Piping Plover is the only company that includes an analysis of a home’s electricity usage in each one of our energy audits. The savings can be huge and the changes can be extremely inexpensive to make. You just need to know where your electricity bills are coming from! If you’re interested in purchasing and installing a whole house electricity monitor just get in touch with us. If you’d like to know how your electricity usage compares to other homes in your immediate neighborhood we can run that report for you in no time at all. Just shoot us an email and we’ll send it to you!