Measuring Energy Efficiency of Your House
With the growing importance of conserving power and more research going into greener means of energy, there is a great emphasis on homeowners to engage in practices that reduce general consumption. This is all the more important when you consider that the modern home costs a lot more to run and burns up a lot more power than homes did even a few years ago. But this also means there’s something of an opportunity for homeowners to save quite a bit of money by learning a little about energy consumption and investing in it.
The first step of course is to figure out how much you’re using and where you need to improve. This article will look at a few of the ways you can measure your overall consumption or find out exactly why your energy bills are higher than you’d like them to be.
Save and Compare Bills
This is something you should be doing already, but if you aren’t, it’s certainly time to start! Learn to read an energy bill (it’s fairly self explanatory most of the time) and take time to compare bills between months. While it won’t give you detailed information about what specifically is hurting you, it’s a good way to measure which direction you are moving in and track your progress as your home becomes more energy efficient.
Measure kWh use for specific devices
The best way to pinpoint exactly which appliances are costing you in the long run is to use an electricity usage monitor. They’re fairly inexpensive and you can get them from most electrical stores, the simplest of which you plug your appliance into and plug it into the wall. It will keep track of how much power the device is using over a period of time and based on this can give you estimates on how much it’s costing you weekly, monthly or an annually.
If you’re noticing that electricity bills are rising and you have your suspicions about what is causing it, this tool can become very handy indeed. It will reveal to you which appliances you should be using less, and which need to be replaced, as well as measuring your savings when you do replace something.
The trouble is that there is a lot more legwork to do when using this compared to some most pricey alternative. To get the most out of this, you’d have to either use multiple devices around the house, or swap one from appliance to appliance depending on need.
For Those Looking to Invest A Little More
Taking it one step further, some electricity usage monitors are combined with other technologies to switch your appliances on and off depending on the time, energy use and other factors. More advanced systems like the Ted Energy Detective allow you to access real time information about your energy use on your computer or smartphone and can be configured to keep a track of your monthly electricity bills.
You can install these kinds of systems yourself, however we’d recommend speaking to an electrician. For the most details, accurate monitoring system, this would be the way to go and studies indicate that investing in this usually leads to overall energy savings.
If after all this you’re still unhappy with how much energy you’re consuming and can’t seem to keep it at a reasonable rate, it might be a good idea to speak to a professional about an energy audit. There are some appliances that by there very nature, suck up a lot of energy and there’s little that can be done about it but monitoring and tracking what’s burning it up can still be very cost effective. For more information, contact the energy rating consultants Superior Energy Rating today.
