OhmConnect Energy Challenge!
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How could I have used so much energy?
We get this question all the time: how is it possible I used so much energy? Your #OhmHour results come in and you were expecting to knock your forecast out of the park, but instead you used more energy.
We’ve written before about the best tips and tricks for beating your #OhmHour forecast and shared this resource to help you find the items in your home that are the biggest culprits of guzzling energy. The New York Times has also written about this.
So here’s the challenge: audit your home’s energy usage.
Whether you’ve got a one-bedroom apartment or five-bedroom home, look around for anything that uses electricity. Go room by room. What’s plugged in the kitchen? Think. You’ve got your coffeemaker. Your fridge. Your toaster. Anything else? Is anything on a timer?
Bedroom. What’s plugged into the outlets? Lights, alarm clock, television? Again, anything on a timer? Anything with a remote?
Perhaps the most overlooked of all locations is outside. If you’ve got a pool heater, or outside lights on a timer, remember that these are using electricity!
Finally, make sure to include your cable box, modem, etc.
Now, Here’s Your Challenge
Make a list of all the items using electricity in every room. Let us know which item(s) you found that you were not expecting. Report your results below.
Comments
Don't forget to unplug:
Air fresheners
Nightlights
Cell, drill, battery chargers
Floor fans
Sewing machines
Hair dryers/Styling apparatuses
Security cams (if possible)
...just as few 'off' items
Always have & continue to unplug kitchen coffee maker, micro, toaster & trash compactor. All lights off during OCH...
Finally bought a Smart Plug, going to apply it to my fridge.
Buy extra candles & make sure to hotspot off cell if laptop low
Yeah, probably wise to make sure cell is fully charged too !
This is fantastic, @Lola & Mase! Thanks so much for participating! There you have it--items that will catch you!
So glad to hear you've purchased a smart plug; these have definitely helped me with beating my forecast.
@Juli Bowman - I know you've done this activity as well. Would you care to share your results publicly?
My son did a search for "Vampire" electronics project for school a few years ago.
One of the bigger items we found was the video games systems. We have 4 game systems and they each used a fairly large amount even when off. We plugged them all into a single power strip, and that stays off unless someone is actually playing a game.
Newer appliances seem to be much better when "off" , but older ones used quite a bit of power when not used. Cable Boxes were really high even when the TV was off. A Tivo we had, which never really went to sleep was 40W 24/7. Newer model Tivos can sleep when not in use,and even when used only take 12-14W.
Modern TVs are much lower power than they used to be when on, and take very little power now when "off". Some have a deeper "off" mode that uses even less power, but take a little longer to wake up.
We also have some outside lights that are on all night (photo sensor) and landscape lighting that on about 6 hours a night. Switching those to LED saved more than 2kWh per day!
Hey @jasmine winch - would you be willing to do an audit of your home?
On occasion Costco have sales on LED lightbulbs and several months ago when they had their last one we took advantage of it and converted every indoor light in the house to LED. We have recessed lighting in every room so this involved purchasing around 30 lightbulbs so the savings on purchase price was a big help.
This snippet of info is taken from a website describing the cost savings of LED bulbs
Now! Please add what you find here!
@KarenE - great information! Super helpful!
What's the record amount of energy that anyone has saved for an OhmHour?
Is there a leaderboard? That would be a cool feature.
But maybe it would be more motivating to see and easily compare how much users are saving during an OH compared to other users or even for lifetime energy savings. Although, when making any comparisons, you have to be careful about how you include and compare users who are already super low energy users. They have a lot less energy to save compared to high energy users such as people who live in the valley and run their AC often, have a pool pump and/or electric vehicle.
Instead of, or in addition to, showing how people rank based on # of kWh saved, it would definitely be beneficial to show and rank people by the % saved compared to forecast because this number is relative to the individual user, so it doesn't matter if the user is a high or low energy user - it puts everyone on the same playing field for comparison. Or maybe it can show something like "Your kWh or % savings is more than x #/% of users that participated during this OH.
What do others think? How about you @Kate from OhmConnect
@That Son Of A Bitz I think doing this as a percentage saved against the 10 day rolling average is a great idea. Might get a bit skewed though by weather patterns for solar users. Also even with your example, of the high AC users and users charging EV's, they are going to do really well with the % if they have smart EV chargers and smart thermostats hooked up, and therefore they are going to have a skewed % number relative to low usage users.
Oooh, I like this idea!!
I used my trusty Kill A Watt meter to measure how much various things around my house used. Here are my results:
Power Consumption
Essential oils diffuser
Air filtration system
Juicer
Blender
Kitchen Aid
Power drill recharger
Hair dryer
Sonicare charger
Lamps
2 TVs
Alarm Clock
I did recently stop using the plug-in string lights I have in my bedroom, and started using a battery-powered option
Record amount for a single event since summer of 2016, is 138kWh. Wow! Of course it isn't really fair as we have some businesses on OhmConnect in addition to homes. Maybe a serious home workshop? Or a bitcoin miner? Or a Back to the Future flux capacitor? My personal max is 11kWh and our top usage is definitely the HVAC followed by pool pump and under the house fans when we had some flooding (they were running 24x7 trying to dry things out).
> There's a leaderboard that shows which users have earned the most points since they joined.
>
> But maybe it would be more motivating to see and easily compare how much users are saving during an OH compared to other users or even for lifetime energy savings. Although, when making any comparisons, you have to be careful about how you include and compare users who are already super low energy users. They have a lot less energy to save compared to high energy users such as people who live in the valley and run their AC often, have a pool pump and/or electric vehicle.
>
> Instead of, or in addition to, showing how people rank based on # of kWh saved, it would definitely be beneficial to show and rank people by the % saved compared to forecast because this number is relative to the individual user, so it doesn't matter if the user is a high or low energy user - it puts everyone on the same playing field for comparison. Or maybe it can show something like "Your kWh or % savings is more than x #/% of users that participated during this OH.
>
> What do others think? How about you @Kate from OhmConnect
I had my daughter help me walk around the house. We had to unplug the keurig, the microwave, the oven timer, air fresheners, the tvs and all of the chargers just left in the outlets not being used!
Ask and thou shalt receive... and then some! I decided to do some more digging and get to the bottom of every watt that I'm using during my ohm hours. If I'm not around to unplug anything and it's just my smart devices doing the work, this is where I'm at:
Device___________________________________Watts_____Qty________Total
Nest_Thermostat_Standby___________________2.4________1__________2.4
Philips_Hue_A19_Bulb_Standby_______________0.1________3_________0.3
Philips_Hue_LED_Strip_Standby______________0.5________1__________0.5
Philips_Hue_Bridge_________________________1.8________1__________1.8
TP-Link_HS100_Smart_Plug_________________1.9_________3__________7.6
TP-Link_Onhub_Router_Minimal_Traffic________6.6_________1__________6.6
TP-Link_8_Port_Gigabit_Ethernet_Switch_______1.2________1__________1.2
Netgear_Cable_Modem_____________________11.6________1__________11.6
Obihai_Obi202_VOIP_Modem________________2.0________1__________2.0
Panasonic_Wireless_Phone_Base____________1.0_________1__________1.0
Pioneer_VSX-82TXS_Receiver_Standby_______1.1_________1__________1.1
Google_Chromecast_Audio_Standby__________1.6_________1__________1.6
Google_Chromecast_1st_Gen_Standby________1.4________1__________1.4
Power_Strip_with_lighted_switch______________1.0________1__________1.0
Kenmore_Elite_1200W_Microwave_Standby_____3.8________1__________3.8
Brother_MFC-J4510DW_Printer_Standby_______1.7________1__________1.7
Kitchen_Stove_with_Clock____________________?_________?___________?
_________________________________________________Grand_Total___45.6
Since my Unattended OhmHours are running around 0.044 kWh this sounds pretty exact.
During normal hours, when nobody is home, we also have a Hotpoint Refrigerator using 45.8 W, three Holmes "Single D Filter Size" Air Purifiers using a total of 39 W, and sometimes, a Philips Sonicare Electric Toothbrush which uses 0.6 W. That brings our normal usage to around 131 W.
AND! Just in case anyone is interested, I checked the range of power that the Philips Hue lighting products use. When at their dimmest setting of only red light, the A19 bulbs used roughly 0.6 W and the LED strip used roughly 1.1 W, while at their brightest settings, they used 6.2 W and 6.0 W respectively.
My next project is a homemade UPS system using a large deep cycle battery. It'll keep my smart home equipment running when the power goes out, and I'll be able to run off battery power during OhmHours and shave another 0.022 kWh's off which would also bring OhmHour usage down to 0.022 kWh. Once I get to that point... I think I've hit my limit!
@snetphilie, that's impressive!
And I'm not that familiar with how your LED lights are connected. I think they are screwed in as opposed to plugged in to an outlet where you can plug in an energy kWh measuring device directly into the outlet and then plug in your lights, appliances or what have you, into the monitor. If the lights aren't plugged in, how did you measure their usage?
@That Son Of A Bitz I use a Belkin Conserve Insight Energy-Use Monitor plus the air purifiers and refrigerator are on the TP-Link smart plugs so I can take the 30 day kWh total, divide by 720, and get the average Watts.
The Philips Hue A19 bulbs are the standard screw in bulbs. I tested a couple of them in lamps with the Belkin Monitor. The Philips Hue LED Strip lighting runs off a plug. I had to get the standby usage from technical documents because the A19 bulbs were too low to register on the Monitor!
Finally... my Nest runs an ancient gas heater that has a pilot and requires a thermostat with a battery so I hooked up a transformer on the power line at a voltage that charges the Nest but the heater ignores. That's plugged in so its easy to test!
I unplugged night lights when I get up in the morning. When I am not home, my house was using .33 Now it uses .23. That might not seem like a lot, but .1 x 16 hours a day is quite a bit. I already had switches on TV, stereos etc. now if I can only get my husband to turn off the porch light when he leaves for work in the AM
Connected to SmartPlugs:
Dishwasher
Security Camera
Keurig
Turned off manually or unplugged:
Treadmill
Cable & Internet Boxes
Power strips with TV & Peripheals
Microwave
Garbage Disposal
Humidifier & Nest Camera in Kid's room
Electric Washer & Dryers
Refrigerator: turned up temp settings
Powerstrip that had laptop and monitor connected to it
Smart Sprinkler Control System (Rachio)
2 Plug-in air fresheners
Cell and Alexa Echo chargers
One thing I haven't heard anyone else disconnecting: Garage Door Opener
Things I didn't turn off / disconnect & why:
Stove/Oven: can't reach plug
Refrigerator: can't reach plug
Alarm System: Plug has child proof cover screwed in - hassle to unscrew)
And because I know my wife gets irritated when I unplug stuff and forget to plug them back in, I created a check list to make sure I didn't forget anything. Oh the hell that would break loose if the DVR didn't record her favorite shows like Keeping up with the Kardashians or Housewives
Will this be the future of demand response??
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/smart-circuit-breakers-the-next-frontier-of-the-grid-edge
What do other people think?