Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
5.6
Monitoring
Monitoring your energy consumption is an important part of conserving. It's the
whole reason for the HEI. Using the HEI you can monitor your energy efficiency
for your whole home each month. However, it's necessary to monitor energy con-
sumption on a smaller scale as well. Every time you make changes to your home in
a way that may effect your energy consumption you want to take detailed measure-
ments to determine if the changes you made are actually improving your energy
efficiency.
For instance, if you want to check to see how effective solar screens are then you
might observe your electric meter the day before you install the screens. Pick a time
of day when the sun is shining on the windows you plan to improve. Let's say from
12 to 5 pm. Make sure you are not doing other electric consuming activities during
that time such as washing clothes, cooking, etc. Observe your electric meter and
record the readings at 12 and 5 pm. The difference between the 12 pm value and the
5 pm value is the kWh consumed during that period. This will be primarily from air
conditioning. The next morning install the solar screens and take the same readings
from your electric meter after installing the screens at the same times as the previ-
ous day. Assuming the temperature on those 2 days was nearly the same, we hope
too see at least some improvement in kWh consumed on the second day.
You can do the same sort of thing when you replace large appliances such as
refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, ovens and microwaves. Record your elec-
tric consumption before and after making the improvements. You might want to
do a similar test to see if your fireplace is actually helping or hurting your heating
capabilities in the winter. If you have an electric heat pump it's easy. Just use the
same procedure as described above. If you have natural gas, propane or fuel oil for
heat then you might want to spread your test out over a period of a couple of weeks
rather than a couple of days.
Whole house monitoring systems make it a little easier to monitor your home
electric consumption for specific periods of time. These systems cost from $ 100
to $ 250 and connect either to your main electric panel or outside to your electric
meter. These systems typically monitor every appliance in your home all at once.
However, you can configure some of them to monitor individual circuits in your
breaker box. Some systems connect to your Wi-Fi network to allow online monitor-
ing. More recently these systems allow you to actually control your appliances from
your laptop, tablet or smart phone.
Your utility company may also provide information about your consumption on-
line. My electric company provides a nice chart of hourly consumption for any day
in the recent past. Other services may provide data from your utility company for a
fee and allow you to access it online. These services can create useful reports and
comparisons with your neighbor's consumption.
You can test the efficiency of smaller appliances by using a plug-in monitor like
the Kill a Watt, Conserve Insight or Watts Up Pro. These devices allow you to plug
an appliance into them and count the kWh consumed over specific time periods
[12].
