Energy monitor adverts have been doing the rounds for the last few months, mainly trying to pique your interest in changing provider for one of these gadgets. Are they really worth the hassle though?
After getting in touch with the UK’s major energy providers to see if we could have a play around with what they offer, we were kindly given two energy monitors. The Ecomanager from EDF Energy and the Smartpower electricity monitor from Npower. The Ecomanager came with wall socket monitors and hub, whilst the Smartpower comes with a mains connector and hub.
Socket to ‘em
The two monitors differ greatly in what they offer you in terms of energy saving. Monitors that take readings from individual sockets are great in some respects; you can see how much your TV and Sky+ box use on standby. However, turn these appliances on and it gives you a minor heart attack. When using my TV and Xbox 360, I was more focused on the energy I was using (costing £23 per month) rather than the game at hand. Whilst that reading was for non-stop energy use, I ended up turning it all off to make my conscience feel better.
I decided to regroup, I had a cup of tea (kettle used 114 watts) and went about fitting the rest of the socket monitors, placing one at the computer and the other on the spare room’s TV. This is really where the energy monitor comes into its own.
Seeing how much energy is used at each socket, how much it costs you per day and also per month means that you are aware of the energy that you are wasting. When on standby appliances still use energy, but it takes a monitor to help you know how much that costs you (TV £7.98 per month, laptop £8.02 per month). The Ecomanager also enables you to turn off all sockets that have energy monitors attached, directly from the hub. So the next time you’ve just got in to bed to realize that you left the TV on standby, you can turn it off without even getting out of bed.
The house, the whole house and nothing but the house
With my faith in energy monitors restored I moved onto looking at mains connected monitors, in the shape of the Smartpower from Npower. Whilst this doesn’t have the ability to turn off appliances, it can tell you how much electricity is being used throughout the house. The first thing you will inevitably do, is run around your house turning everything off so you can turn it all back on, appliance by appliance (guilty as charged).
Whilst this can be done to with a socket based monitor system, the hub can only handle a certain number of sockets at one time (15 in the case of the Ecomanager). The mains connected monitors therefore give you a wider, if a little less detailed, view of your energy use.
Although seeing the total energy cost is useful, it can be a bit of a struggle to find out what just made the level jump up, especially with family full of people doing their own thing under one roof. In the end it was only big spikes like hairdryers and microwaves being turned on that I really noticed.
If you are thinking about getting an energy monitor take into account what you want to get out of it; better control over energy-use hotspots or a running total of how much you’re spending. On the one hand the Smartpower gives you the full picture of how much you’re using but being able to turn things off from another room is not to be underestimated.