Hi,
On Sat, Jul 09 at 12:35, Terry Coles wrote:
> On Saturday, 9 July 2022 09:53:31 BST Peter Merchant wrote:
> > I borrowed an electricity power meter for a few days and went around the
> > house measuring everything. A couple of interesting discoveries:
I've been monitoring my whole house consumption with a Current Cost
meter for about 12 years now. The meter spits out XML on a serial
port which I capture with a script and save the number to a log file.
Saved me money a couple of times detecting security lights that stayed
on all night etc.
Anyway over that period the whole house standby consumption (running
fridges etc) has gone from about 500W down to 200W. Some has been down
to newer better electronics devices with lower standby modes, an old
laser printer used to be 45W in standby the new one is <1W. But the
big shift was when our two fridges and the freezer were replaced due
to failures. There seems to have been an order of magnitude improvment
in fridge/freezer efficiency in the 20 years between the old and the
new. So if you have an older device it's worth checking it out.
> I have one permanently connected to the tails from my Solar Panels.
>
> > Total standby power of devices in the house = 28.5 watts This is sort of
> > invalid because the monitors on my 2 tower PC's are on a switch that turns
> > them off when the PC is off so their standby power is less then. Also the
> > meter seemed to register in increments of 0.5 watts.
>
> When the sun has gone down, my Solar Panels show a consumption of 57 W. I
> don't believe for one moment that the panels work at night (it's pretty much
> always the same regardless of the level of light for street lights or the
> moon), so that is consumption just to keep the inverter alive.
I also have solar so a lot of my daytime electric is "free" but I'd
check your solar standby consumption numbers. Overnight my solar
controller goes to sleep consuming <0.5W, it even turns the Ethernet
interface off. When it wakes in the morning as the solar voltage rises
it consumes no more than 10W for the few minutes before it fires up the
inverter. 57W sounds very wrong.
And yeah solar has paid back the investment over the years even if SSE
has defaulted on the FITS payments this year. I guess they have
financial problems and it easy for them to stitch up the small guys.
--
Bob Dunlop
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