Appliance electrical usage???

RuggieBear

Is there any device to work out how many units of electricity a particular appliance is using? Getting hit with horrific electricity bills and I'm dead curious to know what's costing me what....

Girlfriend is convinced it's the PC being on all day but I'd like to know for sure....

Can anyone please advise?

Macy

RuggieBear wrote:

Girlfriend is convinced it's the PC being on all day but I'd like to know for sure....

afaik PC's, TV's etc don't use much once they're running. It's switch on that uses the power.

Anything that's electrical that heats uses a lot of power - so immersion, electric shower, tumble dryer, washing machine doing hot washes on cold inputs etc would be my initial guesses....

RuggieBear

yeah...tbh i reckon it's the immersion. and i have no idea how to connect a timer for it.

Macy

RuggieBear wrote:

yeah...tbh i reckon it's the immersion. and i have no idea how to connect a timer for it.

If you meter is easy to get to watch it spinning when the immersion is on, and then switch it off and see the difference. And show the girlfriend too if she starts blaming anymore of your stuff .

Can't help on the fitting of a timer, but don't think it's as hard as you'd think necessarily. Certainly I have a couple of DIY books that have instructions - but I don't actually need to so haven't ever attempted it...

Actually if it's just on most of the time, probably be a saving paying someone to fit a timer by the sounds of it...

parsi

Well if you find out its power rating (in watts) you can get a fair idea.

A unit of electricity is 1kilowatt/hour - so for example a 100w light bulb would take 10 hours to use 1 unit.

So if your pc is drawing 300w then it uses a unit about every 3 and a bit hours. If its on for 10 hours a day thats 2 units a day which is 180 units per 2-monthly bill. If a unit is around 10c (+vat) thats €18 + VAT per 2 months.

generally as said above any device thats using electricity to heat something or move it is more of a power eater.

RuggieBear

cheers for that....

/me runs off to watch meter

prospect

The biggest offenders are:
(in no particular order)

ELECTRIC SHOWERS
TUMBLE DRYERS
IMMERSIONS
KETTLES

RuggieBear

bugger...
Checklist:

ELECTRIC SHOWERS
TUMBLE DRYERS
IMMERSIONS
KETTLES

parsi

Well you can narrow that down because you won't spend more than an hour in the shower or using the kettle during the day - unless you're a mad tea-drinking cleanliness freak.

qazxsw

there was a device to do what you want in Lidl a while back - only worked for a "plugin" device a.f.a.i.k


you plugged the "monitoring" device into the socket and the actual device into this - a sort of "piggy in the middle"

presume they are available elsewhere...

RuggieBear

for the immersion i'd probably have to splice a device into the mains....

Lex Luthor

RuggieBear wrote:

Girlfriend is convinced it's the PC being on all day but I'd like to know for sure....

Can anyone please advise?

Sounds to me like she's trying to distract your attention from the real culprit...
Has she bought herself any "toys" recently? :cool:

slayer92

Bear in mind that ESB prices have increases hugley over the past 18 months. 1 unit (1kwh) used to cost less than 10cents, it is now over 13cents.
As the previos poster said, you can get energy monitoring devices that plug into the sockets and measure power used by the appliciance.

If you want to see how it is really done have a look at the following site

http://www.bwired.nl/stroom.asp

regards

slayer

RuggieBear

cheers

yeah the price increase is probably what it is....just seems so high