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We all have a lot of these little guys in our life

In the first post of this home power audit series I described a way of measuring your power usage with a plug-in power meter. But what about electrical devices that don’t plug in?

We can get a good idea of home much power our battery devices use from rechargeable batteries. Using my plug-in meter I checked how much power it takes to recharge some flat AA batteries.

The bottom line:

Recharging 4xAA batteries took 0.13kWh of juice.

This usage would naturally include any overhead power loss from running the charger.

Should I use rechargeable or disposable batteries?

Rechargeables, always.

A rechargeable battery should be good for about 250 charges. At 0.13kWh for four batteries and 12.8p/kWh you’re looking at about 0.41p per battery per charge. Over the lifetime of the battery it’ll cost you a little over a £1 to recharge your £2 battery.

The equivalent 250 disposable batteries will cost you about £125. So it’s £3 vs £125. Per battery. Chargers cost about £10-20.

So apart from saving yourself a truckload of money you’ll keep a huge amount of highly toxic heavy metals out of the environment and you’ll save the hassle of continuously having to buy new batteries.

This is an absolute no-brainer, folks. If you haven’t already, buy a charger and start phasing your disposable batteries out when they run flat.

This might be going a little overboard...

By now, we’ve probably all heard that we should unplug or switch off any devices on standby around the house. The reward for doing so is that we get to continue having a planet to live on. Seems fair, but how true is it?

What’s the problem?

A lot of devices these days do actually consume power after they’ve been switched “off”. This can be seen from the results of my home power audit. Here’s some examples:

So in fact it does look like we’re wasting some power. On all these devices “off” is taken as being switched off with the button on the front panel. Idle in the case of the tellys is standby mode, waiting for the remote to turn the screen on, and for the hifi is switched on but not playing anything.

How much is this costing me?

Even with them all switched “off”, we looking at wasting 4.3W. At 12.5p per kWh you’re talking about £4.70-ish of electricity per year. So hardly a big deal. However, if they were all left on idle we’d be looking at £33.40, which is starting to look like a real waste of money for just three devices. And i’m betting anyone that doesn’t live in a cave has a lot more than that.

What can I do about it?

• Obviously, switch everything off whenever not in use.
• If practical, switch off at the wall whenever you can.
• Automate: buy timers that will switch off at the wall for you while you’re asleep or at work.

Tell me about these timers

They’re cheap. You can buy a plug-in timer for as little as £2. At that price it’ll pay for itself pretty quickly, and saves you the hassle of having to go around switching things off.

I sort my jumble of cables into things that have to be left on overnight (eg: router) and things that should be switched off (eg: TV) then put all the latter onto a timer that switches them on for a couple of hours in the morning and the evening. The timers have an override switch if you want to turn stuff on outside of these hours.

In my case I let the timer in my living room turn on for about 8 hours a day. That’s taken my standby wastage from 38.8W down to 28.5W, a saving of 27%. At that rate the timer pays for itself after 9 months, then everything after that is a saving. Best of all, I don’t have to actual do anything. Laziness + saving the world = win!

Savings will be even bigger on some of the more horrific standby power offenders. Mostly i’m thinking of PCs, more on that in a later post.

Most of us only get a rough idea of how much electricity we use from how hard the power company stings us each month. But do you have any idea exactly what machines in your house are slurping all that juice? The only way to find out is conduct a home power audit, and the results can be pretty interesting.

Why bother?

1. It’s easy. All you need is a plug-in power meter.
2. Green is good. Conducting an audit will show you how you can reduce your carbon footprint.
3. Money is good. You could be wasting a lot of cash each month.

Ok, how?

Plug-in meters are cheap and will pay for themselves in the savings you make

A plug-in meter does exactly what it sounds like. For my audit i’ve used a Brennenstuhl PM230 meter. You can pick one of these up for about £13 in the UK, and it does everything you need.  Another popular meter is the Kill-A-Watt, but they cost £10 more and do the same thing as the PM230.

These meters can do a lot of stuff, including calculating the actual cost of the power you use, but the main useful functions are showing watts being used by a device, and tracking usage over time in kWh.

Interpreting the results

First a bit of basic electrical theory. You’re probably aware that the power supply that comes out of the socket is rated in volts (either 230 or 110V AC, depending on what country you live in). But the measure of actual power consumption is the watt (W). Your power supplier bills you for the electricity you use in kilowatt-hours (kWh). Pretty simply: 1000W for one hour is 1kWh.

For most devices you’ll want to simply plug in your meter and note how many watts it sucks. For machines that run intermittently (such as fridges) you may want to take an average reading by leaving the meter plugged in for several hours. By dividing how many kWh by the number of hours you can get a rough average reading in watts to compare to other devices.

Important: Don’t forget to take readings of devices in their “off” and idle states. Many machines still suck juice when switched off, and anything that’s in a standby mode will certainly be slurping pennies out of your pocket the whole time.

Ok, let’s see some results!

Click here to download a PDF of my audit results.

Over the next few blogposts i’ll be taking a look at my results and discussing some of the issues, along with tips about how you can reduce your usage. Click on the tag home power audit on the right to see all the posts.

A little battle in the fight for a free web has been won

Well, here’s a small victory for the little guys:

BT dumps Phorm, Phorm stock slumps

Talktalk do likewise

I’ve never been a fan of TalkTalk, their door-to-door sales tactics are horrendous, and bordering on deceptive, but they’ve done something right this time.

So that just leaves Virgin Media riding on the Phrom train. Can’t be long before they jump ship, surely?

The new version of Firefox is out now and will be included in Karmic when it’s released in October. If you’re running Jaunty and you can’t wait that long you can get a stable release of it now.

This PPA is a stable release, so you won’t be getting the unstable daily builds that you’d get from the Mozilla Daily PPA.

Step1

Go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal and paste in:

sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys 7EBC211F

This adds the key for the PPA.

Step2

Go to System > Admin > Synaptic Package Manager > Settings > Repositories > 3rd Party and paste in:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-security/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

If you’re not using Jaunty just substitute your version.

Step3

Let Synaptic reload then install the package firefox-3.5-gnome-support. That’s your new browser and associated packages.

Step4

Go to System > Prefs > Preferred Applications and change the browser from firefox %s to firefox-3.5 %s. That’ll ensure that anything that wants to open a browser window will go to the new version.

Benefits of the new version include greatly improved speed and support for new web features like playing embedded videos without needing plugins. Downsides at the moment are that some of your extensions may not have been updated for 3.5 yet.

There’s been constant rumours of a Google operating system since the dawn of time. A while back they let slip that inside the Googleplex they use a customised version of Ubuntu (called Goobuntu, naturally). Lately they’ve developed their Chrome browser and the Android mobile operating system. Since they compete against the likes of Microsoft already, surely it was just a matter of time before they attacked Redmond where it hurts: the desktop OS?

Google says it’s all true

Chrome OS will be a lightweight Linux distro aimed at the netbook market. All they’ve said so far is that they aim for speed and focus on the web. Presumably that means plugging right into Google’s excellent range of cloud services, as Android does.

They’ve also said they will use a “new windowing system”, by which they probably mean this distro won’t be wearing either Gnome or KDE. Hopefully that isn’t going to break compatibility with the vast number of existing Linux apps, which would be a massive shame for users.

No word either on whether Google will be maintaining their own repo, or whether they’ll be piggybacking on one of the established distros. Also under wraps is which browser this web-centric OS will be running. Android runs Webkit and Google have strongly promoted Firefox for years, but the obvious choice would seem to be the Chrome browser.

So not a lot of detail, but tantalising news indeed. Netbooks pre-installed with Chrome OS should be available in late 2010.