Have you ever wondered how much electricity you use, compared with your neighbors? Well, I do! I’m on a monthly averaging plan, but every month, the bill seems slightly higher than the last one. I basically know what is consuming most of our electricity; we have about a thousand things plugged in that are in stand-by mode! Our refrigerator and washer/dryer are about 12 years old; presumably they are consuming more juice than they should be. I would really like to know what I could do to minimize my usage, without having to resort to power strips or the manually unplugging all of the power vamps!
I would just like to know how inefficient my house really is! I saw this really cool story on the news, about the Sacramento Municipal Utility Districts (SMUD – great name!) attempt to make its customers more aware of the energy they were consuming. They started comparing each customer to their nearest 100 neighbors. Then they gave each one a grade, happy faces or frowny faces. I think the story made national news, because people actually got mad when they were given the “frowny” face. Personally, I think it is rather funny. Interestingly, SMUD removed the faces, but left the comparison bar graph. Apparently, this comparison data is having an impact on how people are managing their usage. Households that were using 3 times more electricity than their neighbors, received a real wakeup call and started to change their habits. A good thing all around, both for the environment and the pocket book.
I going send this note to my power company and see what they have to offer. Maybe they can run a custom report for me, I am just so curious about my consumption. Maybe I really don’t want to know! I promise to report back the results, should I actually hear from them.
Here are two more interesting links I discovered… The quote, taken from the Google.org site, applies to my day job in software development too…. “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” %G—%@ Lord Kelvin
- Live monitoring of your electrical consumption, a SMUD service.
- Live monitoring, the Google.org Energy Information Initiative
