So last night I tracked my consumption during Earth Hour with The Energy Detective hooked up to this webite. Here’s the graph for the hour (click for larger image). It updates approximately every 1-2 seconds.
Now I have all electric baseboard heating as well as cooking and other appliances. We don’t have any Natural Gas or oil appliances.
What I unplugged… not just turned off, but unplugged or shut off at power bar so there was no “standby” usage):
- – All “power bricked” items, mostly tech stuff. Cell charger, laptop charger, external hard drives
- – TV/Cable Box
- – Electric baseboards with no wall thermostats
- – “Dead Body” freezer
What I “turned down”:
- – All The Electric baseboard heaters
What was still on/normal (drawing 440W):
- – Our Living Room light (70W)
- – My Internet, energy and weather (for alberniweather.ca) data collection equipment (150W)
- – Stereo and Nintendo Wii were on Standby (couldn’t find the plugs in the rats nest!) (10W)
- – Fridge (200W?)
- – Other stuff(?)
That’s about it. As far as unplugging stuff. I couldn’t unplug all of my entertainment equipment because I wasn’t sure which was which and didn’t want to take the chance of unplugging my Mac Mini that was serving up the energy data. So those were on standby. Other than that, I left the living room light on… yes, many people went lights out… but personally, I see Earth Hour as a “use less” not, “go back to the dark ages”. This Hour was about realising how much power we waste. So leaving the only light on that we need is, IMHO, perfectly fine, and as you will see, if we want to make a difference on how much energy we waste, that difference won’t be from CFLs.
After we went around and turn off/down everything, I monitored the usage and noticed the spikes. We hadn’t turned down the heaters completely in the kids room.. but since they were sleeping already, we went ahead and turned those down too.
Then you’ll see the “Dead Body Freezer”… I wasn’t happy that we were still drawing 740W, so we thought for a bit and realized… THE FREEZER. We got one of those long chest type freezer for $20 when we bought the place. It’s perpetually half empty and is constantly running. It draws 300W… and probably costs us $100 a year to run.
That will be our first replacement as soon as we can afford it.
The last thing we learned was from our spare bedroom baseboard heater. I had turned all the stuff down 20 minutes before the “Hour” started. Turns out, the spare bedroom must cool down the quickest, because that heater was the first to come back on.
Here’s a comparison of Friday nights Hour and Earth Hour…
On the left is Friday Night from 8:30 to 9:30PM… we were just watching TV, doing computer stuff, and we made popcorn for a movie.
On the right is Earth Hour on Saturday night.
And Finally, You can see our daily routine for Saturday, March 28 to this morning in the graph below.
