Energy Efficiency

Our energy usage is now down to less than a third of that when we moved in (see the meter readings page). I expect that this is mainly due to the warmer weather. It will be interesting to see if the usage increases again as the air cooling system kicks in.

Our energy chart is still heading south.

I've been looking at the various consumer-grade plug-in energy meters that are on the market, in case we decide to buy one for our own experiments. I thought that the results of my search might be of interest to some readers of this blog, so here they are, in Excel format:

http://blogs.picotech.com/media/users/jeff/plug-in-energy-meters.xls

This spreadsheet contains some supplier names, prices and specifications in addition to the information in the picture above. I don't recommend that you make your final decision based on this data, but at least it will save you from having to work out how many different models there are and who makes them.

Disclaimer: I don't guarantee that the prices and specifications in this spreadsheet are accurate, up to date, or the lowest available. This is an indicative survey only, and not an endorsement of any product or supplier.

Today's meter readings are now on the "Latest energy usage chart" page. The current clamp readings from EnviroMon seem to be converging with the meter readings, which is reassuring.

On Monday we made a couple of significant changes to the air conditioning.

To see if we could reduce the usage for the marketing office, we took one of the two units off the master timer so that it now has to be switched on and off manually.

Also, we moved the sensor for the unit covering the board room, the MD's office and the server room into the server room, and set the controller to 24/7. This means we now have proper air conditioning for the server room at the expense of no longer having any control over the board room or the MD's office. In the longer term we plan to get a dedicated unit for the server room.