mending things

I have been monitoring my electricity consumptions for a number of years on the basis that, in order to reduce it, i need to understand it first, i.e. where does it all go ? Initially I took a reading from the meter once a week , then subtracted the past reading from the current reading to get the weekly usage. I did this in a spreadsheet. Now I use The imeasure which is a web site run by Oxford University. It does this and many more things, including gas consumption and factoring in weather conditions. I also monitor my real  time using a current cost device, monitoring the whole house, plus a couple of individual appliance monitors (IAM) which provide me data about individual appliances. I can publish this data to the Internet via the current cost NetSmart unit. All these methods give me a better idea of what I'm using and where it's going. I should explain that my household uses gas central heating as the primary source of heat and hot water. My weekly electricity usage...

I am on an Economy 7 electricity tariff. E7 , as it's abbreviated, offers lower cost electricity at night, but with slightly higher day rate and standing charge. The original reason for E7 was so the Electricity providers to reduce the peak demand. In very general terms, the electricity we are using now is being generated now. This means that the grid has to anticipate peak demand, fro example the ad break in the middle of "Coronation Street" , when millions of viewers get up and switch electric kettles on. By encouraging people to use electricity during off-peak times i.e at night, less generators have to be bought online. Also the mix of generators determines the amount of CO2. For live CO2 data from the grid see http://realtimecarbon.org/ You can see that the mount of CO2 released in grams per unit is at it's lowest at night. Also lowering peak demand means less power stations needing to be built The biggest household use of electricity is heating water and space ...