I recently purchased a watt meter for the house and it came in the mail yesterday.

Nothing fancy but it does the job. And that job is to measure the electrical usage of individual items in your house. They do make systems that integrate with your home at the panel – giving you immediate feedback on the entire house, but my last name isn’t McDuck so I zeroed in on the $18 model.

Yeah, so I’ll be testing out the items in our house that you might consider luxury items. Stuff like computers and TVs and the wine fridge. Eventually maybe the regular fridge with the aim to find a more efficient one.

We’re already pretty energy conscious at the Logz. We switched all the light bulbs inside and outside to CFL immediately, we hang most of our clothes out to dry in the warmer months, we’ve got our consumer electronics on power strips to eliminate phantom load, and we don’t have A/C. Amy’s so chea… I mean sting… I mean efficient, I sometimes get the lights turned off on me while I’m in the room.

I’d touched on phantom load before. Last night I found that my desktop PC consumes a steady 2 watts when it’s off. Or would, if it wasn’t plugged into a power strip. It’s not a lot, but then you’ve got the toaster and the microwave and the TV(s) and the cable box and the Xbox and the stereo and the clock and the DVD player. Pretty soon you’re talking about a decent sustained draw, for no other reason than to let you turn them on with a remote. Or show the time.

Primarily I got the meter to test the efficiency of my recently built HTPC against the retail options. I’ll reveal those results later, try to contain yourself. But I’m going to go around the house and check everything, just for my education. I can’t really see us using much less currently. I’ll have to pry the wine fridge from Amy’s cold, dead hands and besides that, we don’t really use a lot of power. The next step for us is really just energy efficient appliances. And then ultimately solar, but that’s another story and another house.

Which leads me to this recently published study on the public perception of energy consumption and savings. I heard about it over on Arstechnica and the real takeaway message for me was;

“The gap between curtailing inefficient appliances and using efficient ones can be large, so it shocked the researchers how many people underestimated it. An example: a 100-watt bulb that is on for six hours uses 600 watt-hours. By leaving it on for one hour less, you save 100 watt-hours. On the other hand, a 15-watt fluorescent bulb could be left on for all six hours and only use 90 watt-hours, saving 510 watt-hours over the incandescent bulb.”

You just can’t beat using energy efficient products. You may think you’re being a good doobie by keeping the lights off in rooms you’re not in, but you’ve already lost at the starting line if you’re using incandescent bulbs. And by loosing I mean, money for you and resources for everyone.

Some people tell me they don’t like the color rendition of CFL bulbs or they’re expensive. No and no. These bulbs have come a long way and they aren’t expensive. Actually, I don’t know what they cost because we bought a bunch 5 years ago and there’s still food on the table and I haven’t been back for more (because they’re so efficient). So I assume the outlay didn’t devastate us. They’re warmer colors now too. More like incandescent. True, they take 10 seconds to warm up to full strength but are you that concerned? You need 100% output now?

Yeah, so watt meters. I’ll lend you mine if you’d like!