Measuring your energy use
Take a hard look at your energy usage
Energy usage and energy costs can depend on where you live, the time of year, how many people live in your house and the amount and age of your appliances.
- Measuring your energy use can be as simple as gathering your utility bills and charting the monthly totals. This will give you an overall view of your whole house energy use per month and per year.
1. Your energy suppliers might be able to provide a graph of your energy costs per month for the previous two years.
2. If this is not available gather two years’ worth of your utility bills and put them in order by date. By using an Excel spreadsheet or just a piece of paper create a month by month table with energy costs for the month in one column and the monthly bill in the second column. From this you will be able to see when the energy cost has increased or decreased.
3. You then need to determine why costs have increased or decreased. Look back at that month’s energy bill. Was the change due to a fluctuation of the weather or the cost of the utility rate?
- You can also do this by identifying the energy using appliances and electronics and assign universally known averages to each of them to get a rough idea of usage.
Here are a couple of links with appliance wattage and an estimated of average monthly usage:
Estimated wattage:
- Another way is to measure actual usage of individual appliances and electronics by using a device that plugs in to the appliance and notes the usage in standby and the “on” position.
Calculate usage from your meter
Use a small watt meter, or this
- Although these devices are helpful they only measure the appliance to which it is plugged. To measure the whole house and the real-time usage another device is used.
Use a whole house meter or this
