mending things

A number of my posts here regard my battle to replace GU10 and MR16 Halolgen bulbs with LED equivalents, via a short period of CFL bulbs. This has been successful, with all the 40 halogens having been replaced with LED some 5 years ago. My energy consumption has gone down and so has the amount of heat generated into the loft and ceiling space from the bulbs. Since then I have kept an eye on LED full size light bulbs for ES (Edison Screw) SES (Small Edison Screw and Bayonet fitting bulbs, all of which are represented in my house. Until recently I had found the LED lightbulbs to have dimmer light and a cold blue tint, much as the first Halogen replacements had. A few weeks back while in my local B&Q DIY store I saw a display of Philips LED Bulbs, some of which featured clear glass and a kind of internal perspex crown-shaped diffractor. I'm pleased to say I have tied both in SES , ES and Bayonet form-factors and they are superior to the Com...

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...

Inspired by the success of my bridged energy monitor which enables me to publish to and access data from the web, I decided to also get an IAM. CurrentCost is a household energy monitor, which uses wireless technology to communicate with an inductive 'clamp' installed around the mains electricity cable in my meter box (see other currentCost post). Recently the bridge enables the display to post data to the web. The IAM is a small unit resembling an electrical plug with a socket on the back. Basically you unplug a piece of equipment in your house, plug it into the IAM and plug the IAM into the wall socket. What it does is enable you to monitor individual appliances in your household using the CurrentCost display, in addition to the whole household. My Display supports up to 9 IAMs in addition to the primary function of displaying the total household consumption. I've always been a bit mystified as to why my background usage never falls much below 300 watts. Even while...

I just got a 'bridge' for my current Cost CC128 device enabling me to publish data to dashboard etc. Early days but here is my currentusage Works well, and meant that I could monitor my household energy use from abroad while on holiday ! The currentcost dashboard at my.currentcost.com has a mobile browser version which worked on my Android phone.

So in my previous blog I outlined how it's easy to log your consumption, how to convert everything to the same units (KwH) and a site - imeasure - which makes this a lot easier. If you do all of the above , or even some of it, you will see how much energy you use per week. Over time you may see trends, probably connected to the seasons. My household gas usage drops in the summer and rises in the winter - pretty predictable stuff. I'm going to park oil, as I don't have any experience of using heating oil, but much of what I describe will be similar for gas & oil. Separating the consumption of gas , in my case for central heating (CH) and hot water (HW), from electricty for a moment, it's worth thinking about what determines how much is used. for gas, it's used by a boiler. the boiler heats water in a heat exchanger which is pumped through the house, and diverted either through a coil in a how water tank (HW) or through radiators in the house. This is referred in...