New Toy

For Christmas Jen got me a watt meter.

Sounds boring huh?

Yeah well I’m a little strange and knowing what the various appliances/devices in our house are consuming as far as electricity goes is interesting for me.

Can’t say there’s much I can do with that knowledge, but it’s interesting none-the-less.

The watt meter tracks voltage (to see fluctuations which can destroy today’s sophisticated electronics), kWh, and total cost if you set the cost per kWh. Considering we have solar, kWh should be the measurement I use, but cost per month makes it more relevant to you the reader.

So what’s the big consumers in our home (besides the obvious fridges and what-not that everybody has)?

First up was our whole house dehumidifier. See our house kind of sits on a spring. Unlike everyone elses house that gets too dry in the winter ours remains too wet. To combat this we got a whole house dehumidifier and run it off and on throughout the year. When it got cold about a month ago and we started waking up to moisture collecting on our windows,

we turned on the dehumidifier and ran it 24/7 ever since. Wondering what kind of impact that has on the wallet, I threw on the watt meter for 24hrs.

Ouch. That’s $75.79 to run for an entire month. I based that on our current $0.165 rate per kw from Peco (which is going up quite a lot next month). Hmmm. Maybe it’s time to check the humidity levels again and see if we can’t cycle that dehumidifier more? Sure enough the humidistat we were using was a little off, so we have scaled the dehumidifier back some. I’ll have to put the meter on it again to see what cost we’re tracking at now.

On to the next item.

Know those little lights on your stereo and gaming console that stay lit all the time even though you have it all turned off, what’s that cost us?

Whew! Only $0.47 a month. Granted that would go up if we actually turned it all on and used it, but that doesn’t happen too often in this household.

Next up was the heat – specifically heating with our pellet stove. Our pellet stove is the primary heat source in our house (except for 4 hours at night – during those 4 hours we run the forced air propane furnace to insure enough warm air gets into Abigail’s room for the night; otherwise, her room would barely get above 62 degrees). After a 24hr period this is what we had,

Not bad.

So that’s the info so far. Now I have to figure out what’s next. I should probably put the power strip on it that runs to my laptop and monitor. See how much I’m burning sitting here in front of this thing.

– b