Some people who have these meters post their home energy use on the Wattvision website, which allows us all to take a peek at how much energy people use in their homes.
If you go to http://www.wattvision.com/rankings, you can see there's quite a range of consumption. (It helps to know beforehand that a kilowatt hour is equal to using 1000 watts of electricity for one hour, e.g. leaving a 100 watt light bulb on for ten hours.)
Use per occupant on the list varies from 1 kilowatt hour per person per day all the way up to 90. That's a huge range in consumption habits. Then there's someone called "Electron miser in NJ" who's blowing us all away, consuming only half a kilowatt per person each day. My family uses about 2 kilowatt hours per person each day, so we're doing pretty well. Since we live comfortably, the range of consumption suggests there's a huge amount of energy that could be saved if people make an effort.
For those who like more technical discussions and a look at some of the data the meter generates, the company blog is worth checking out at http://blog.wattvision.com/.
Thanks. Interesting article about gamification (motivating people to make energy saving into a game). One thing I'd like to see happen is to have all towns automatically receive their energy use on a frequent basis from the utility, and then have competitions between towns.
ReplyDeletewhere can i get this sensor to mount on my meter >
ReplyDeleteWattvision.com is a Princeton-based company you should be able to purchase from directly. Black and Decker also makes a whole house energy meter that mounts on your electric meter outside. I purchased one, but wasn't able to get it to work properly. Our electric utility meter outside the house has a disk that rotates. The disk has a little black dot line on the side of this thin metal disk. The sensor for the whole house energy meter tracks each rotation of the disk by how often the black line comes around. Since we only use about 8 kilowatt hours of electricity each day, that disk is rotating very slowly, and the sensors can lose track for lack of frequent enough input. Years back, I bought a TED meter that needs to be installed in your service box in the basement. That's a trickier installation, but for measuring low amounts of energy use, it has proven more consistent. Definitely look for product reviews/comments posted at the online retail sites. I just noticed that the WattVision monitor is available on Amazon, or directly from their website.
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