Experiment: A Personal Energy Audit
A week ago today, I pulled the trigger and invested in my business in a big-equipment way, and bought a solar generator (this post does not include sponsored products).
I founded a mobile knife sharpening business, and up until now, I’ve mostly been servicing clients in my neighborhood because my business model currently involves me sharpening at my house and picking up/dropping the knives off.
Having a mobile power source means I can sharpen on-site, which changes my turnaround time to minutes instead of over an hour. Not only is this less driving for me, and a more premium service for my clients - a generator lets me spend more of my time in the business doing what I started the business for: working with my hands and sharpening wares.
I did months of research, watched every comparison video under the sun, and the answer to my question of ‘which one do I get?’ kept boiling down to doing something called an ‘energy audit.’
I learned that an energy audit helps you to understand how and where you use energy. If you performed an energy audit on your home, you would compare what used energy, how much energy was used, and how often. This is to break your energy needs down on a per day basis.
For instance, my refrigerator pulls 150 watts every other hour for a total of 1800 watt-hours per day. Then you add in your microwave per day, TV per day, phones per day, and so forth until you have your total energy per day figure. That total energy per day number is what you would use to choose a generator, so your daily needs can be met.
I took this exercise as an opportunity to explore the idea of a personal and internal energy audit. Where is my energy? What energizes me? What takes energy away, perhaps at an alarming rate? What restores my energy? I set out to answer these questions.
As my daily life does not have appliances with metrics I can look at for energy expenditure, I chose to break my daily total energy per day number down hour by hour, so that I can total it at the end of the day and see what used energy, how much energy was used, and how often.
My metric for how much energy I used was the feeling encompassed by the word ‘energized’. As human beings, we are not machines, and how we get energy is not as static as appliances. For instance, an extrovert could expend energy in talking to a close friend and feel more energized after that conversation than before it started!
For this experiment, I plan on using an energy scale of -5 to 5, with 0 being no loss or gain. I am setting out to energy audit myself over the next 48 hours. To do this I will be keeping a journal of my activities with their corresponding energy scale scores. I know this will be illuminating. I am curious if the path of least resistance can be found this way.
Stay tuned for the results!
-C
