| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| Mrs Fiddlesticks |
we've got an OWLhttp://www.theowl.com/ It arrived today and we've got it working already. Its a sensor you clip on the meter cable in the cupboard which registers electric usage and displays it via a monitor in the house. Its really easy to see what whacks the usage up ( I put the hob on and my goodness!)
It appeals to the money conscious housewife and the gadget loving husband 
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| Chez |
Ooooooh, that looks good. Although I did think you might be talking about OWLS in the Harry Potter sense for a minute 
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| 2steps |
so did I but that does look good 
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| jema |
I am sorely tempted. What with the office our electric consumption is not great 
Being able to see and show the kids the effect of things could be well useful. |
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| Penny |
Well get thee behind me Mrs F, I too was tempted and have succombed (sp  ) 
I can't wait to show the children how mcuh they are using
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| Marionb |
It does look good. I'm just wondering though, our meter box is in the utility room, which is a single storey extension, and its right near the back door. If the sensor is clipped to this, it will be a long way off from some rooms, particularly the upstairs bedrooms. Will this make a difference, do you think? I cant seem to find anywhere that gives the range it will work in. | ||||||
| Mrs Fiddlesticks |
our meter is in a box on the side of the house. The clip is on that cable and then the monitor display is in the lounge. The cable is the live from meter to fuse box so its monitoring the up and downs of electrickery draw. Just looking in the manual and it says that the range from clip (which is attached to a sensor box again in meter cupboard) to monitor is 30 metres. |
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| Mrs Fiddlesticks |
we've been playing with that all evening. quote - 'the OWL has found out YOU'VE left a light on in the bathroom' sadly it doesn't work on unflushed toilets... 
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| Penny |
Don't suppose it works on toilet seats left down and weed on either then 
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| Mrs Fiddlesticks |
sadly not; I wish it did mind you a discovered unflushed toilet is £2 in this house! That's £2 each child unless someone owns up! ( I know, I know, but £1 didn't work)
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| Mrs Fiddlesticks |
Penny; I've thought of another use..  Eldest was moaning about the heat today; he wants an electric fan  I suggested if he was that bothered (and opening a window wasn't sufficient) he should save up his pocket money and buy his own. With the OWL I can see how much a fan costs to run - 'so that'll be 10p per hour then please'..
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| RichardW |
For individual items you are better with a plug in meter that will only measure what the one item uses over a period of time. The whole house aproach needs care as things can & do turn on & off all by themselves so can corupt readings on individual items.
Whole house meters are good for looking at peak loads. We are looking at using bats inverters & a genny. I know exactly what each item uses max, daily, yearly but not what my peak load is. Just adding them up would not give a reliable reading nore does deviding total daily usage by 24 hours as usage is not evenly spread. Justme |
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| Mrs Fiddlesticks |
we've got a plug in meter but of course you have to plug it in to the right socket around the house.
Our view on the OWL is that its a comparative thing. At the moment its reading 5.8p an hour of electrickery usage. Putting the kettle on for a drink just now and it shot up to 35p an hour! Its the jump we're interested in and how by turning off as much as possible we can watch it go down; the little things add up and we get a sense of scale. |
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| RichardW |
It all helps
1p per hour is £87.60 per year Justme |
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| jema |
We have ordered one, whilst we are facing a bit of a financial ripple right now and trying to avoid spending too much, I think £30 is well justified on one of these. | ||||||
| Barefoot Andrew |
Ooh, I might get one...
A. |
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| Nick |
Contact them, see if there's a discount for buying 10?
Reckon we could shift them easy enough on here. Edit: Have emailed them. |
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| scoop |
I can't recommend these enough. We have halved our electricity consumption over the last year. | ||||||
| Penny |
Poo - I've already ordered mine
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| marigold |
Can't see the point myself - you can do all the things in their ten point plan anyway and monitor usage using the electricity meter. The gadget has to be manufactured, packaged, transported and disposed of at the end of it's life. And it uses batteries! Still, people like toys  .
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| jema |
Just got ours, and my current reaction is ouch
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| Mrs Fiddlesticks |
have you started turning things off to see what happens? We can get our base line reading down to 2.1p an hour. This morning it read 5p so I found myself wandering round the house checking for rogue things left on I think the warm weather is giving the fridge freezer something to do which is upping it. |
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| marigold |
Although I personally think they are an unnecessary gadget I will give the company top marks for the speed with which they responded to my enquiry about where the OWLs are manufactured and their recyclability (made in China, with internationally sourced components and WEEE standard disposal/recycling). | ||||||
| jema |
Well each to their own view. But to my mind having this with its big LCD display hung up in the Kitchen showing dosh per hour where all can see it, is something that will keep peoples eye on the ball. | ||||||
| marigold |
Yeah, but I live on my own and have Total Control Over Everything in my house  , so my viewpoint is a bit different to those of you with families to train . And like bois with flying, I have a bit of a thing about gadgets and sometimes feel compelled to point out the transport-miles, manufacturing and disposal costs to the environment which might offset the benefit of whatever the gadget does. If someone gave me an OWL I'd probably be fascinated with it for a while then it would become clutter .
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| jema |
Even with the freezers off, we seem to be base lining at 300w which is quite scary. That's not far off £40 a month for nothing. |
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| Nick |
How much if you flick the main fuse off?
We used to have electricity if our main fuse was on or off, due to ancient wiring in terraced housing being...shared. Shocking, quite literally... |
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| RichardW |
You are getting well stung on your prices. 300w per hour is 7.2kwh per day or 223.2 kwh per month. At 12p per unit thats £26.78 or on E7 65.1 units at 4p £2.60 and 158.1 at 14p £22.13 Total £24.73 And we get stung for our prices here so yours should be cheaper still. Justme |
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| jema |
Actually we are under 10p per kW/h so I was out on those figures by the seem of it. So about £5 a week then, which is not so bad, but still a large base figure that does need checking some more. | ||||||
| RichardW |
Turn off one trip switch at a time till you see the circuit thats got the drain. Thats will help you narrow it down.
Justme |
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| Chez |
I've just ordered one ...
And looking at the 10 point plan, we already do most of that. |
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| Penny |
We got ours today. Immersion Heater 
What's the basic background for most of you? |
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| wizz |
this looks like a must have for us!
just had a bill which informed us our dd was increasing from £39 per month to 72 !
immediate reaction was that as it was based on estimates it must be wrong... until we read our mter and realised that they had understimated by quite a bit
gulp! wizz |
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| gil |
If you mean at night, mine would be equivalent of about 6-7 units a day, mainly winery-related equipment (2 chest freezers and the fermentation chamber heater) |
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| Penny |
Ours seems to be about 2 pence per hour, which still works out at £174 a year.
Must hunt down those pennies
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| Mrs Fiddlesticks |
The lowest level we can get ours to is 2.2p an hour. We've turned off as many standby things as we can, but we have a fridge freezer and large chest freezer plus some permanently on computer infrastructure (wireless lan)
This morning its dark and Tim's working from home so we need lights on at the very least as well as more computer power for his work. (we have amused selves with talk of getting the electrickery bill down by not using lights as much as possible, but then spending more money on candles )
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| jema |
I have not seen ours get below 4p an hour, though that is with one low energy PC left on.
It is interesting to see how the little odds and sods mount up. An external hard drive left on 24/7 seems to be about £20 a year. |
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| Mrs Fiddlesticks |
agree. Its the cycling of things as well like the fridge working harder when its hot out as it did last week. I'm not sure how much all these things with transformers (like light fittings etc) draw a current? |
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| Penny |
We've now managed to get ours down to 1.8p an hour. That's the electric fence for the chickens and the fridge/freezer. | ||||||
| Mrs Fiddlesticks |
That's impressive! What else did you turn off? - in case I'm missing something |
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| jema |
I did try with the sky router box, first pulling the plug then unplugging the transformer and no change registered on the 1/10 of a penny an hour scale. With our set up the sensor is around one of the incoming/outgoing cables, can't see which and as the cables are very tight together I can see the reading being a bit messed up, perhaps registering twice to some degree. |
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| Penny |
Everything really I suppose I just make sure it's reading that when we leave in the morning.
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| RichardW |
One of the power companies is giving them away free.
Justme |
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| alison |
oooh
Which one? |
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| Marionb |
Yes - which one, Justme?
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| RichardW |
E-On I think.
Will confirm when next TV advert is on. Found it free meter Justme |
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| alison |
Thank you
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| RichardW |
Not exactly sure what sort of meter it is as they say to "plug" it in but the pick shows a remote screen type.
Justme |
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| vegplot |
we have one and it doe it's job well although I'd like to see it extended to include other features such as datalogging and displaying total daily usage. | ||||||
| Penny |
It seems most useful to check you've left nothing on in the house when you leave in the mornings, although I do now have to get ready a bit earlier so I can do my manic rush round to see what's been left on
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| vegplot |
Looks like owls are causing a bit of a storm...
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| Jamanda |
I'm surprised the artist formerly known as Ruby didn't mention that she has an owl on her electric meter.
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| Cathryn |
Bet it's prettier than all the others. |
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| Helen M |
good lord
paul is tight enough already, i wouldn't want to encorage him. he'd be making flow charts within 24 hours
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| Penny |
It's quite addictive. I often say in a very loud accusing voice "who's making us use that much!" to be told, quite politely in the circumstances, "you have the oven and the washing machine running dear
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| Helen M |
lol you hum it i'll sing it!
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| Cathryn |
I want one now.
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| jema |
I'm just trying to copy the contents of an external hard drive to a usb stick. In my kind of job the drive does have to be pretty much on all the time and by my calculation even a little thing like that can be over £25 a year, pretty much the cost of a 16gb memory stick currently. | ||||||
| Penny |
That does seem ot make ecomomic sense. I'm still looking at our owl everyday. Playstations are the bane of my life at the moment. The boys both have one, and I do a lot of shouting 
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| Pilsbury |
well mine was delivered today and the longest part of instalation was finding my small screwdriver to put in the batteries the rest took about 30 seconds.
We got ours mainly so I can see how much the dehydrators cost us to run so we can include the costs in the business plan but it will also be used to shut down as much as possable to offset the costs of running them. but I can see it being addictive. |
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| Penny |
Ahh, do you have the instructions to hand? Ours ran out of battery the other day, so it's lost all the settings we had in it and I've put the instructions "somewhere safe".
Currently we're in cents and amps Don't suppose a little telephone instruction help would be possible would it - pretty please??
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| Pilsbury |
well I am just loking through the instructions to find out about switching between volts and amps but cant find it at the moment.
to chage the volts to 230 you need to push mode and alarm together and it shows what it is set at, then press mode again and the value blinks and you can change it to 230v for the UK using the arrow then push mode again and it is set. then push mode and alarm together again and the currency blinks and use the arrow key again, then push mode to set it and then mode again when finished. If you nee more info PM me you number and I will give you a call. |
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| Marionb |
I changed electricity suppliers and got a meter free
However it doesnt seem to work properly - it's supposed to show the amount of energy used during the morning/afternoon and evening of the previous day (but doesnt) and neither does it show the amount used over the last 7 days. It even sometimes shows our present energy usage as 0 - even when we've got loads of things switched on. 
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| Penny |
Thanks Pilsbury
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| jema |
The EJ ads are throwing up:
http://www.biggreensmile.com/products/wattson-from-diy-kyoto/wattson.aspx?productid=wattson Which seems like an owlalike, but 3x the price and with a host of unneeded features. |
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| sean |
I can't see that you need either. Just switch stuff off if you're not using it. | ||||||
| Penny |
You wait until Ben's a teenager
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| Pilsbury |
We got ours mainly to see how much the dehydrators are to run so we can factor in a sensiable cost but its quite an eye opener when you see the cooker is pulling 20p an hour and each light in teh house is 1p and hour. Our peak at tehe moment was 45p an hour whan we cooked dinner and had all the dehyrdrators running but dropped to 2.8p an hour whan we went to bed. |
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| wildfoodie |
just ordered mine...
29.95 from ethical superstore. |