Sherlock Homes
We’ve recently hired some help around the house, Wattson (Whats on?) is his name and he’s an energy butler or i guess going with the metaphor he’s our assistant as we act as energy detectives uncovering wasteful devices and practices in our house.
Wattson, designed by DIY Kyoto, is an elegant, simple to use unit that displays your electricity usage in Watts (and $ if you like) as well as glowing colours (Blue = good/low Red = Bad/High). It receives data wirelessly from a wee box you install in your fuse box (if you’re lucky no sparky is needed as you just clamp the induction coil over the wire that leads to your fuse switch). I had some fun trying different wires in our rats nest of a fuse box and running up and down the stairs - turning the kettle on to see if the display goes mental until finding the right one - but i got there.
From there it’s a simple matter of setting up the software (Holmes of course!) and syncing your mac (or PC) to the Wattson and signing up to the online community. You can then track/compare your results with the global Wattson user community. The software also shows CO2 output (though based on UK figures i think so it’ll be low for Australians as we burn so much dirty coal to fire our electricity).
Zeroing your house
Once set up i had fun ‘zeroing’ the apartment, by this i mean trying to get the Wattson to show 0W on its display. I couldn’t for the life of me get the last 30 W even after i turned every unused charger/light off. Finally i realised that we have a remote control fan/light system in the master bedroom - there’s the usual mains switch which must be on but then the controller device (i assume in the fan) actually switches the light/fan on and off via the remote control.
After much Holmesian pontification and forensic thinking it hit me that this was the culprit .. and sure enough i switched the mains light off (it was day so the light wasn’t on) and my erstwhile assistant Wattson reported zero! Success! I had zeroed my apartment!
Its fun to do AND its kinda like being Sherlock Holmes at home (Sherlock Homes?) trying to find the devices sucking that last bit of energy.
I can track data over time and find out what the ‘ambient’ energy is when a few things are running and really see how a device affects the readings. (Kettles use thousands of Watts so best to fill them up only as much as you need for instance). I also discovered we have an electric hot water service as Wattson shows a few thouand Watts being used for 5-10 mins at seemingly random intervals, not great but we live in a rental so not too much i can do there im afraid.
Wattson will also help me to offset the exact electricity figure through Climate Friendly when its time to offset via Gold Standard European carbon credits (No good using Australian ones as it’s likely you’ll just be giving the big polluters your money)
More soon as i get my head around the data results for the week!
