Efergy Smart Meter

In a bid to do everything to reduce expenditure, I have focussed on Electricity consumption. When I last checked the cheapest supplier for my energy, I found that our household uses the “average” amount of gas for a UK household, but 1.5 times the “average” amount of electricity. I recently heard of a device called Electrisave, which is designed to get your electricity meter out of the cupboard and put it in front of your face. The objective is to allow you to monitor continually the total consumption of power by the house, and take action when it seems too high. In researching the Electrisave, I came across a superior product called the Efergy Smart Meter. This device does the same as the Electrisave, but also has a memory so that you can review historical consumption without needing to note down meter readings. The Efergy Smart Meter is also about GBP 25.00 cheaper than Electrisave. The only down-side is that the designers have not taken so much care over looks, and I would say that the Electrisave is a more elegant gadget compared with the Efergy’s functional feel – something that may be important if you want to keep it on a coffee table in a pristine living room; but something which matters not one jot to me.
The Smart Meter works by monitoring the current flowing through the wires leaving your electricity meter (which it does by induction, so there’s no wiring to do, just a clip that fits round the meter wire), and transmitting a radio signal from the meter cupboard to the hand-held metering unit. This means that the device is completely wireless and can be taken from room to room to keep an eye on what happens when electrical equipment is turned on. It runs on AAA batteries, 2 in the transmitter, and 2 in the receiver. The transmitter batteries last only about a month, so rechargables might be a good option.
So what have I learned about my energy consumption? If you’re going to make savings you need to learn what’s going on and put some changes into practice. The unit costs GBP 45.00, and as electricity costs GBP 0.07/kWh, you have to save about 650 kWh before the unit has paid for itself. That might not seem much – savings of 10% are quoted by salesmen – but it does require very disciplined application. It’s no good turning off stuff today and then ignoring it for the rest of the year. Smart Meter is a way of life. You have to watch it all the time. However, it does teach you some basics about electricity consumption. For example, I found that the house consumes a base load of about 200 W. That is, when I turn off everything, I still see (by torchlight) a reading of 200 W, which must be accounted for by standby, digital clocks, wireless access point etc. That might not seem a lot – a mere GBP0.336 per day – but this is a constant load which adds up to over GBP120 on my annual bill. (Or course the central heating pump and the fridge are intermittent loads, and it’s hard to know if they are included in this figure or not.) Another lesson is that lighting actually uses up a lot more energy than you’d expect. The humble 40 W light bulb seems fairly cheap to run (less than 1 kWh per day). But we have these in triple light fittings, so that’s 120 W for each fitting. Then consider that we have four of these on the ground floor and five on the first floor – that adds up to more than 1 kW just in lighting if you put on all of these on together.
To sum up: the Smart Meter is an educational tool which will open your eyes to the way you use energy. However, you need to be obsessive if you really want to make it into an investment and expect to save any money by purchasing it.