Finding your electricity bills are shooting up? That’ll teach you for having too many gadgets, and leaving them on standby, won’t it?
We covered something called an Energy Meter back in Show 19 of our podcast, and talked about how these can be used to keep an overall check on your power consumption, but how do you go about working out what’s draining the national grid and running up your bill? It’s actually not that easy to work out what a day’s use of a kettle equals in pounds and pence on your bill. So, watt’s the answer?
Ahh well, you’ll need a different type of meter to work this out – one that plugs into a mains socket and shows that amps, volts, watts and kWH of whatever’s plugged into it. Some examples of what we’ve discovered:
- £11 a year for a 60w bulb we use for 5 hours a night
- £55 a year to run a washing machine
- £50 a year to keep a PC running for 8 hours a day
- £9 a year to keep a BT Home Hub on power
- Only £0.46 a year to keep our telly on standby
- £13.29 a year to keep our Top Up TV set-top box on standby
Not a lot in isolation, I grant you, but it all adds up. We’ll be covering this in Show 30 of our podcast, and we’ve added a new page, How Many Watts, to our site.
OK – go turn off all the lights, and switch off your PC now…
Haven’t you gone yet?
so let me see your using a gadget that you have to plug in (and in such using electricity) to work out how much electricity that gadget is using? does that mean you would have to buy two so that you could work out how much the tester unit is using?
and only the geeks among us would have thought of using more electricity to use less would be a good idea! :OP