The Energy hub is fascinating – but the thrill of your changing energy usage will soon wear off
Energy Hub
It’s well known that putting an instant digital readout of your miles per gallon on a car dashboard makes people drive more economically, even if only unconsciously.
Now something like that idea has come to watching how much energy we use, and British Gas is now offering customers who sign up to its (free) EnergySmart service a dynamic electricity usage monitor worth £35 for free, plus a consumption history and loyalty bonus.
But more relevant is that it says trials have shown that customers can save £110 annually by seeing the real-time information on their monitor, and changing their behaviour.
You don’t have to be a British Gas customer to try it out – the meter is available from Green Energy Options, where it’s the cheapest in its range, at £39. Installation is fabulously simple: find your meter, clip the supplied magnetic loop around an input wire, pair with your readout meter, take the meter somewhere and start fretting about how much energy you’re using. (The device itself, by the way, uses about 0.25kWh annually.)
The meter offers lots of different settings. The standard one is an immediate readout of how much energy you’re using at the moment, with a total for the day below it. You can also see how much carbon dioxide you’re producing to power that TV.
You can set yourself a daily consumption target. Or, more attention-grabbingly, how much money you’ve burned today, or this month, or in this billing cycle, or against a target.
To figure out your monetary consumption, you have to enter your tariffs, which is easy enough – except if, like me (with E.ON) you have tariffs that don’t begin and end at times of day, but after you’ve used a certain number of kilowatt hours. Simple enough, though: take your last bill, put in the average price per kilowatt, you’re away.
So now you now much how energy you’re using, and how much it costs. And this will obsess you. The numbers will harass you. Put the kettle on? Are you mad? That’s 3 kilowatts in a burst!
The most dangerous time is when you are left alone in the house, just you and the monitor. You will watch its ebb and flow and wonder: what the hell is using all that energy? It will certainly get you leaping to replace your incandescent bulbs with low-energy ones (and in time those with LEDs). Then you’ll be wandering around turning off things to see how much energy they’re using. (Sky+ boxes use more than 100W while on standby, I found to my surprise.)
Will this change your behaviour? It may, but unlike the car dashboard readout, you have surprisingly little control over a lot of your energy use beyond a certain point. The fridge, the lights, some TV … sure, it adds up, but you can’t do it more efficiently per se, unlike driving. Over time, you’ll probably ignore it for the most part, and only notice it if something jumps in the consumption.
In short: wonderful at first, and then part of the wallpaper. Which isn’t to say that it’s not useful.