bombs in bottles
I borrowed an energy monitor from my local library. It's a device you plug in to determine how much energy your various electronic possessions consume. The one I borrowed even allowed me to program in what I pay per kilowatt-hour, which allowed it to calculate automatically what I was paying per day, month, and year.
I plugged it in with nearly every electrical item in my house. I skipped the refrigerator and dishwasher (because I didn't want to pull them out to reach the plugs), the washing machine (because I never removed the "estimated energy cost" sticker anyway), and the items on 220 (because they won't plug into the gadget anyway).
Here are some things I learned about where my electron consumption goes.
I will definitely be using these less....
In my basement TV space slash art hole, I have fairy lights hung up. I assumed they did not use much energy, because they are small and do not emit much light.
...Reader, they eat more electricity than all the rest of the lightbulbs in my house COMBINED. And I still have two incandescents! Leaving these on 24/7 would cost me a whopping $186.60 per year.
I'm not taking them down, but they are now For Special Occasions Only. When they finally die, I will replace them with LEDs.
I have two box fans. One does fan duty, and the other is attached to a Corsi-Rosenthal box:
https://corsirosenthalfoundation.org/instructions/
Each of them would cost $72.58 to run on high nonstop for one year.
Weirdly, they differ in how they use energy at the "medium" and "low" settings. One of them uses about $51 of electricity per year at both "medium" and "low." The other drops to $61 at "medium" and $51 at "low."
I built the Corsi-Rosenthal box because I assumed a box fan had to be less expensive to run than the big house filter. I was wrong; the big filter costs $42.47 per year to run (I really do never turn it off except for maintenance). Oops. I will keep the box, but I'm only going to run it when the AQI gets so bad it's making me sick indoors.
I have a desktop with two monitors I use for freelance work and a laptop I use for on the go stuff. The desktop costs over three times as much per year as the laptop to run. I'll keep using it - the multiple monitors, extra processing power, and ergonomics are too good to quit completely. But I'm rethinking which machines I use for shorter tasks, like paying bills.
I'd heard that phone chargers eat electricity while plugged in, even when they aren't charging anything. Mine eats about ten cents a year that way - not enough to be worth unplugging.
But the television. Dear God.
Turned "off," the television still burns $10.57 of electricity per year. Turned on, it burns over six times that much.
Ultracompact fluorescent bulbs are still far more efficient than incandescents: About $10 a year for a 100-watt UFL versus $42 for a 40 watt incandescent in full-time use. CFLs fall somewhere in between; the one on my desk uses about $21 a year if run full-time.
Still, I thought UFL bulbs were far more efficient than that. I guess I won't give up my habit of obsessively turning lights off whenever I leave rooms.
Surprisingly cheap to run:
The most expensive alarm clock in the house, a vintage Timex, costs $1.73 per year to run. The clock radio by my front door, which tells me when it's time to go to work, costs about $0.86 per year (it more than pays for itself in getting me clocked in at work on time). The one by my bedside is even cheaper - about ten cents per year. Turning the radio on only adds a few cents per year.
I love clock radios and have them in nearly every room in the house, so heck yeah. Bring 'em on.
Running the microwave five minutes a day costs about $11 per year. Makes me want to learn more about microwave cooking.
I plugged the meter into the basement chest freezer while the compressor was running and nearly died. If the compressor ran 24/7, that thing would cost me $681.00 per year. That's four months of groceries. That's emphatically NOT worth the amount of garden produce I store in the freezer year-round.
...I came back ten minutes later, after the compressor had shut off, and the power use was $0. Estimates for this model of freezer say it probably costs about $65 per year to run, which means it's running 10 percent of the time or less. (It's also full for most of the year, making it more efficient.)
Whew.
The TV is by far the biggest energy-suck-while-off item in the house. Other things that also eat electricity (and thus cost money) even when turned "off" include:
For decades, I have kept these items plugged into a power strip that I turn off when it's not in use. My husband used to think this was paranoia; he was sure it didn't save us enough money to register on our monthly bills.
...It was saving us $20 to $30 per year. Reasonable minds can differ on whether that's enough to justify putting everything on power strips, but I was right that the difference was measurable. Ha.
I'm definitely going to learn more about microwave cooking. I'm often only cooking for one or two people, and it uses far less energy than the oven. (The air fryer also uses less energy than the oven, so I'll probably use that more as well.)
I already have everything that draws an "off" current on a power strip, but I think I'm going to split the downstairs desktop computer-printer-DVD player between two strips. No reason for the computer setup to be drawing idle power just because I'm watching a DVD.
The house air filter saves me more than $40 per year in asthma-related doctor's visits, so it stays on. However, I am going to make more effort to clean the filters regularly to keep it at peak efficiency. (When I measured its electrical use, the filter was gray with dust. It's supposed to be black.)
I'm not making any big changes, but it's neat to see where the electrons go when I buy them.
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