Tracking the Power Consumption of Your Gadgets
Last week Brady posted on the tools one can use to lower your power usage. The problem for most people is that they are very dimly aware of what uses power. Jamais Cascio of WorldChanging points out that cars with realtime MPG usage displays tend to make people more efficient drivers. Certainly when I am in a car with a MPG meter, I usually treat it as a little game where the objective is to get as high a MPG rating as possible.
This "making the invisible visible" idea can be applied to electricity as well, there are a numerous tools on the market that let you find out in realtime how much electricity one appliance, or the entire house is using.
The simplest tool is a Kill-A-Watt; available from plenty of online stores for around $40. You plug them in and they tell you what that device is using at this given point in time. More general versions are The Energy Detective and Energy Monitor house meters, both of which will report the current, average, and peak power use of your house. If you have variable pricing, future versions of these products could give you the ability to show you exactly what your power use is costing you in realtime.
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> why not just TURN OFF whatever you do not need
Great idea. Now, if it were only true that you actually turned something off when you pressed the OFF button.
All theze gizmos that accept remotes (e.g., your VCR), or are in sleep mode (your PC), or needs to be pre-warmed (your reliance on older technologies such as a tube-based TV), have time displays (many) constantly use small amounts of power.
Meters may show how much a drain these many items add up to WHEN OFF. They may also help steer us to more efficient items, or consciousness about the benefits of turning something off if we would otherwise leave it on to avoid startup times a minute later.
Hard to argue against knowing what you're really doing instead of just assuming things work in some idealized way.
Sorry to drive this topic off the road, but just imagine what you'd do if you could monitor your body?! I mean, if you're a diabetic, or hypertensive, wouldn't it be great to have 'gauges' to see if you're managing your condition well? The current state is kinda like driving without any gauges if you ask me. In the dark. With your eyes closed.
We are in the process of completing an audit to determine the various power draws on AC breakers, individaul AC outlets and pieces of end user hardware. We are looking for a previously designed format or style of matrix to document our results and have them availble in the future to be able to make informed decisions when we can add more hardware to an individual outlet or are we at 70% capacity and need to add more power. Are you aware of nay such software for this type process?
We are in the process of completing an audit to determine the various power draws on AC breakers, individaul AC outlets and pieces of end user hardware. We are looking for a previously designed format or style of matrix to document our results and have them available in the future to be able to make informed decisions when we can add more hardware to an individual outlet or are we at 70% capacity and need to add more power. Are you aware of any such software for this type of process?
In addition to the two hardware based metering displays you mention (The Energy Detective and Energy Monitor), I've found another unit that I like a bit more. It's called the Power Cost Monitor
http://www.powercostmonitor.com/index.php?products_id=3982
I think it's the one I'll save my pennies and purchase.
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NY NJ [05.22.07 04:19 AM]
This may exemplify the over dependence of industrial societies' reliance on technology to do our thinking for us.
Realistically, why not just TURN OFF whatever you do not need to use at a given time. If a product is needed - it is needed, period.
But for those having lights on in rooms or offices no one is using, or isolated radios, TVs or air conditioning units on in empty rooms, just remind yourselves to turn them off until they are needed again.