Understanding power consumption at home
We’re power dependent, we use power to help improve our lives and it’s so easy because we just need to plug an object in the socket and the magic happens.
When we were asked to reduce our power consumption by half, I was quite shocked (and still am). The first question that came to my mind is how to measure energy use in my everyday life. I have to say it’s not easy and it shouldn’t be so hard to calculate. Energy is such an intangible thing but it can be measured with the right tools and calculations. Let’s dive in!
The first thing I did was map all the devices that use electricity and divide them into categories to visualize them better at the end. The personal devices were the hardest to measure (and I’m still not sure about the results) because they don’t say it. I have to look up for battery storage, wattage, and voltage to calculate the power needed for one charge. But while doing some reading this is not enough because the power charger is not 100% efficient so it’s actually using more energy than the actual needed to charge the battery. Probably the right way to measure energy consumption is with an electricity usage monitor (but it was 30€ on Amazon). The other devices were a lot easier to measure, I just needed to find the wattage and multiply it by the time used during the day. I don’t use all the devices every day so I approximate the daily time. For example, I do the laundry every two weeks so it’s like using it 10 minutes a day. In the end, I summarized the results in the excel file.
I live in the university dorm Isaac Newton so I don’t have access to the consumption data of Heat/AC and hot water. But I did some research on the heating and water system and I was quite surprised. The building harvests some energy from the sun using solar panels to heat the water. This water is also used to heat all the rooms (the public spaces use an electrical system). This neighborhood is also very interesting because has a system of district heating, using a cogeneration power plant to provide energy and heat to all the houses (while paying less taxes because it’s more environment friendly). This system compared to the other power plants is more efficient because it collects power and also the heat and distributes it to the houses using insulated pipes and hot water. This approach is very diffused in northern Europe. The same water system is also used to cool the dorm during the summer with cold water.
What I’ve learned
Collecting data on power consumption is very difficult. I believe that having more transparent and easy access to this information is key to informing and helping people reduce the usage of energy.
Cooking, preserving food, and cleaning clothes use the most energy (I have no data on heat and water remember) so in the next diary, I would investigate different ways to cook, preserve food, and clean clothes using less or no electricity. See you in the next days…
