Power Monitoring by Richard Holland

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Power monitoring may sound a bit technical, but when applied in a home environment it is really quite straightforward. There can’t be many people left in the UK today who are still unaware that reducing power consumption in your house makes a very positive contribution to reducing your carbon footprint, as well as cutting your electricity bill. Most of us make an effort to try to cut down on our usage of electricity after we see a programme on TV or read an article on the subject, but it often doesn’t take long to fall back into bad habits. There is an easy way to overcome this problem; a way which can involve the whole family, and this is to actually monitor the power you are using on a regular basis.

To begin with, before you embark on the latest round of cutting back, you take a meter reading at the same time each day for, say, three days. This provides a baseline if you want to set a target, but at this stage it is probably best to just aim for a change in the right direction; targets can come later. You then have a family discussion about what everyone is going to do to reduce their individual use of electricity, mostly by switching stuff off that isn’t being used, and turning down the heating a bit if you haven’t already tried this. And don’t forget that installing low energy light bulbs is a real winner.

Continue the daily meter readings, and if you have children old enough to do this, then get them involved as well. Hopefully, you will see an immediate reduction. If not, then have another family get together to see if you can determine why there hasn’t been a change. Who hasn’t been doing their bit?

By taking these daily readings and talking about them, you automatically raise the awareness level of the whole family, and you will find you have created a self monitoring system which will have everybody keeping an eye on everyone else. So anyone ‘slacking’ is going to be pulled up straight away. Eventually you will most likely find that the whole family will have developed good habits, and you can just take weekly readings to keep an eye on things.

Children should get a lot of fun out of this exercise, especially as it may well provide opportunities to tell their parents off if there is an unexpected increase over a day, and the culprit turns out to be one of the adults. It is so important that children be encouraged to  participate in climate change related projects, because it is their future that is at stake.

And don’t lose sight of the other benefit – lower fuel bills.

R.A.H.  06/03/07