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.

Well, my amazingly cool chook coup is now complete (bar a small addon that needs to be planned a bit more.

(No, the dog is not part of it)

I know she doesn’t look like much, but this is the greatest thing I have ever built. I’m not great with wood work, so I am extremely happy with the outcome.

This end opens to allow the chooks to roam free (which they will do during the day). The coup is also bottomless and I still need to add wheels to it at one end so I can wheel it from place to place.

The roof is slopped to one side to allow for easy water run off, which will soon be collected in a gutter and used to keep the chookies’ water container filled. This is the part that still needs planning, I haven’t worked out how to do it yet.

The nesting ‘box’ is actually just a long bedding piece to allow for the 2 chooks to have a bit more room and will be filled with hay. Its also removable for cleaning.

The whole coup uses stainless and galvanised metal bits to prevent rusting and the coup is also painted in a few coats of weather shield (by far the most expensive part at around $40).

It didn’t come in much cheaper than buying one, but I did it myself and I am seriously happy with the results.

If anybody is interested, I could draw up the plans in Google Sketchup and provide a list of the tools I used.

Next step: Find some chooks! (I can source some Isla Browns from

RentAChook, but if anybody else knows of where to get some other varieties in Sydney, I’d love to know!)