Sustain Myself

A few weeks ago, we had our Cent-A-Meter delivered.

Wow.

The Cent-A-Meter is a small device for monitoring your real-time household power. You can see current usage, current cost, current emissions and then view the peaks or totals for the day, month or quarter. In other words, if you were interested in reducing the power consumption of your house, there is no better way of achieving this.

So, here are some things I have found out since owning the Cent-A-Meter;

1. Our kettle uses more power than our clothes dryer at around 1300W. (Which is 1/4 the power of a Postie Bike and costs ~40c an hour at 1kg of Greenhouse gas per hour.)
2. Our house has 1700W of Halogen downlights (soon to be replaced by LED alternatives)
3. Our big Plasma TV is not as bad as it looks (around 100W above standby – as much as 2 halogen down lights). It also uses a VERY small amount of power in standby (~20W.)
4. The 46CM floor fan is only about 70W.
5. Our innocent looking popcorn maker is 1200W.

Its really cool to see the effect of small things around your house.

My fish tank is the big killer, its an ongoing source of stress as its power consumption is huge. I am in the middle of replacing lights and pumps to reduce its footprint;

1. The lights over the tank are 1200W and run for 8hrs a day. About to be replaced with 300W LED’s.
2. The chiller (which cools the water down when the lights heat it up too much) costs about 1800W!!!! (The need for this will be almost non existent when the LED’s arrive as they generate zero heat.)
3. The pumps in the tank are about 120W – About to be replaced by high performance pumps to bring that down to about 30W.

To give you a disgusting figure of our quarterly power usage, our bills are around $800. This is mainly due to the tank. So once we replace all the bits with more efficient alternatives and get our solar in, it will bring us right back down to earth.

The Cent-A-Meter is such an awesome device and stupidly easy to install. The install instructions are included with it, you dont need to break or connect any wires, it uses a magnetic sensor that clips over your mains cable to sense the power running through it (Keep in mind that a licensed electrician is recommended by clipsal and I tend to agree if you are unfamiliar with the goings-on in a fuse box.) The install for me took around 3 mins from start to finish and we set the display up in the kitchen where we spend most of our time so we can keep a constant eye on it. The Cent-A-Meter set me back $190 delivered from eBay.

We also bought a ScanGauge for the car, I’ll write a post about that shortly too.

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