To save Energy at home, firstly.. we need to identify which appliance at home is inefficient and how much we spend per day and per year for electrical equipment if we let it power up.
Recently, I bought an energy monitoring socket to conduct energy audit on my home appliances. The first item under my energy audit item is my 14 inchi old Hp compaq 4400 laptop which i used to surf net all the time.
This energy monitoring socket looks cool as i can measure my laptop energy usage once i press reset (using pen to touch the reset point) and the built-in counter/timer start to calculate how much my laptop power consumption per day and even per year. I set the cost tariff as 1kwh=$0.22 and it able to estimate the cost that i am going to spend for a year (365 days and 24 hours running) about RM43.80 if i leave my laptop working all the time.
Currently , my laptop is consuming about 26W as shown in the picture.(The figure may varry from standby mode up to battery charging mode -63W).
According to the given manual, the working voltage :150V-276V and operating current :13A max with the accurancy +/- 2%.
From my observation, this product is not bad for rough checking power consumption and it is able to give you a snapshot about energy consumption and estimated cost such as how much you need to spend for that particular domestic appliances when the power supply On.It is so simple, safe and easy for average people to use it because what we need to do is just plug the energy monitoring socket with the appliances and it auto detect and calculate for us without hassle and dangerous.
This energy monitoring socket offer affordable and competitive low end pricing (below RM200), end user need to compromise with some accuracy problem. From my finding and comparison with expensive energy monitoring unit, the error might up to 5% or more and it is not advisable to use it for any profesional report writing purpose. Again , a high end power quality energy monitoring system can cost us up to RM60,000 or more based on high sampling rate and high accuracy.I don't think any of average household who willing to fork out money to buy high precise which commonly used in industry application. Therefore, with that affordable price, i think the money spent is well worth because this simple gadget is sufficient for us to monitor our power usage and save energy is the end of objective.
your blog is really useful for many people I think. Because many times I have found the useful information which was really important for me. Reading this your post was good.
ReplyDelete