How to monitor you electricity consumption and save money

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Our electricity consumption is out of control. We are currently consuming in the region of 1500 kW/h per month which equates to around €130. Simply encouraging my family to be more frugal and turn lights off behind themselves isn't cutting it. This is because the energy the lights consume is not the major factor; I run my business from home and as a result, I have a lot of computer equipment running from early in the morning until well into the evening. There's a printer, phone chargers a couple of desktop machines, tablets and a whole shelf full of routers, cordless telephones etc. I have no idea how much power this stuff is using and half of it is left switched on over night.



Clearly something needs to be done. As EDF are providing me with this product it is in their interest to sell me as much of it as possible, so I won't be waiting for them to advise me. Instead I'll be monitoring our energy consumption in real time with the use of some very neat little gadgets from http://www.efergy.com


First up is the Efergy e2 Optical. Efergy monitors use one of two methods to capture the data that the monitoring devices require to operate. This is dependent on the type of meter you have. You'll want either the e2 'classic' which clips around your incoming supply cable or the 'optical' if you have a modern digital meter. These have an LED on the front which pulses every time a fixed unit of energy is consumed, the e2's optical sensor translates this frequency in to some very useful figures for you, especially when coupled with your actual energy cost. For example, a quick glance at the e2 will tell you what your current consumption is in kW/h. It can also sound an alarm when that figure reaches a specified point. Or if you would prefer to see that in monetary or carbon emission terms, you can do that too.


Currently the oven is on in our house and as you can see from the photo the monitor is telling me that if our consumption continues at this rate for the entire day it going to cost us €9.13! Whilst the e2 is not actively or directly altering our consumption in any way, the visual indication is having an indirect effect on our habits. The news that our currency consumption is equivalent to almost 300 euros a month is all the encouragement I need to break out the storm lanterns and head torches!


If, like me, you want to delve a little deeper into the data you could opt for an Efergy Engage Hub. This device also picks up on the data supplied by the e2 optical but instead of putting it up in your e2's display, it makes it available to you via your smartphone, tablet or web browser. You can further customise the output by entering your cost per kW/h and if you are using 'Heures Creuses' or a tariff whereby the cost of energy differs depending on the time of day, you can set that up too.



Having had the e2 and Engage hub setup and recording our consumption for the last two weeks, it's easy to see where we need to make changes. It comes as no surprise that heavy duty prolonged electrical consumption from appliances such as your washing machine and electrical water heater are key culprits, but having a clear visual indication certainly sharpens your focus when it comes to making energy saving decisions.


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Hi Hilary and welcome to the forum, I am not sure if you have joined the group "Renovation and Construction" but that maybe a better section to post in for these subjects.

http://www.survivefrance.com/group/renovationgroup

I have used the cellophane type secondary glazing on an old victorian house and it actually works and make a difference you can feel.

To stop using so many logs buy a wood burner (Poelle) these will cut the log use by a huge percentage and keep you warmer.

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Hi again,

I apologise for taking this away from the conserving electricity side of keeping warm and saving money. Thanks to everybody with their comments.....I am acomplete novice in this area,but reading these has made me wake up to the fact that I need to find out about tariffs etc and be much more pro-active than just turning lights off. I have a huge boiler fired by town gaz and I only switch it on for half an hour at a time, 15 mins before showering each day...even though the plumber said I should leave it on "as it's so well insulated"....I will not turn it on to heat the place until it gets much colder. I burn fire wood in an open fire in the main living room....but I notice that I'm getting through a lot of logs !

Does anyone know what the long range weather forecast is ?

Thanks,

Hilary, Dordogne.

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Hi James,

Thanks for this very useful info. I have recently returned to my corner of the Dordogne and I am starting to make preparations to keep my as yet, unrestored old stone house, a bit warmer for the coming winter as I do intend to be here for the first time at this time of the year. My budget for this is minute and so I've ordered several packs of 2ndary glazing that is used with adhesive strips and 'shrunk tight' with the use of a hairdryer.If anyone has experience of using this stuff then I would like to know how they got on with it...was it at all effective.

I am also looking at applying panels in the form of a kit.....PVC which is screwed into place and which "The Old House Guy" (an American conservation site)....rates as being quite effective. My windows date from the turn of the century and have all the old fittings (which I do want to keep, even though I know we had temperatures of -17 for 15 days in my part of the Dordogne about 3 years ago)....so they would need to be made to measure.....Does anyone know of a French supplier of these kits ?

Also I have a lot of exposed plumbing pipework....what is the best way to lag this ? Is that foam tubing the best solution ? And where's the best place to buy it in my area...or even online & get it delivered ?

Thanks, I'd appreciate any useful input...

Hilary D.near Bergerac.

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James, I find this sort of technical information on SFN very interesting so thanks for the above suggestion. I just ordered one of these from Amazon. I'm not going to use the Hub initially, I'll just use their Mac application and see how I get on. Should be able to patch it through to one of the TV channels and watch our money going up in smoke in realtime. Looking forward to playing with it. Also based on SFN advice I bought an Ecofan which I'm now watching whizzing around soundlessly. All good stuff.

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OK quick update about the Efergy e2. I have been doing quite a lot of testing of new equipment lately and looking at the cost implications. Our normal usage (at the moment) is approx 18KWh per day but on a heavy use day like yesterday when my wife fired her 7KW Kiln overnight we hit 45KWh. It also showed that firing the kiln cost approx 1.50 Euros which is hand to know. Tomorrow we have a new range cooker arriving and so we will test the consumption under different conditions and I am in the process of installing electric heaters in the bedrooms and bathroom and so can monitor those as well. Will update again soon, but I do believe that this will help us understand our usage, it will not save us money but will help against surprises when the bills arrive.

Rgds, Mike L

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Tony - kVA is Volts x Amps x 1000 and is more or less the same as Kwatts. It's normal in French domestic electricity to have a sealed main switch which trips if you exceed a certain load. That switch is often set in amps (the amount of current). Mine says 45 (amps) and my maximum usage is therefore around 9Kw as the voltage is around 230 volts. Given a specific tariff, what the tables actually show is that the price of electricity per KwH doesn't change according to to the maximum you're allowed (Puissance souscrite), but that the fixed part of your bill (Abonnement annuel) does. You can change the maximum power that you're allowed, and your abonnement annuel will change accordingly, either up or down, and it will usually be accompanied by a chargeable visit by an ERDF engineer. As I've explained elsewhere, you might also have to have an electrician change your main switch.

As for the tables in the link, there are 3 options and hence 3 tables. First is the base option, where electricity always costs currently 13.29 eurocents per kwH, regardless of when you use it. Second is the most commonly used system with all peak hours (heures pleines - HP) charged at 14.67 per kwH and off-peak hours (heures creuses - HC) being 10.02 per kwH. (Off-peak hours are always 8 hours per day and used to even offer cheap electricity for three hours over lunchtime, but most people have been changed to a block of 8 overnight hours. Your actual hours appear on your electricity bill.)

Tempo is the most complex of the tariffs, with six different prices for electricity: HP and HC for 3 different types of day - Blue, white and red. Blue days, of which you get 300 per year, are the cheapest with HP at 9.62 cents per kwH (about 35% off normal HP), Red days are wickedly expensive, to encourage you to shed load, and white days still give a small discount on HP but there's a surcharge on HC. There can only be 22 red days per year, and they choose them as the days when demand for electricity is highest, though Saturdays & Sundays can never be red days. Saturdays can be white but Sundays are always blue. It's complex I know, but great if you have pool which uses a lot of electricity in the summer and you're hardly there at all in the winter. This link gives lots of info about Tempo. The different tabs on the page also show you things like the back history of the different coloured days, how to get sent an email about the days and so on. They also provide you with a little box which plugs in anywhere and shows you today's colour, as well as tomorrow's colour from 8pm onwards.

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Hi Tony, yes on the face of it a heat pump is the best option unless you have space for solar. Major important part of your pool should be insulated sides and bottom, that can half your heating requirements when used with a good cover. You can also make big savings (90%) on the electricity used to power the pool so that would help offset the spend on heating. Energy saving on pools has been a project I have been working on for several years and is a world away from the old designs of the 1950's as the water is also much cleaner and therefore easier to maintain. My 8m x 4m x1.5m runs on 35watts outside of the swimming times and 69watts during swimming times, quite possibly the most efficient swimming pool in the world.

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Tony - EDF publishes a guide to their various Tarif Bleu prices in a single page that makes it easy to compare the TTC prices of their 3 systems at http://particuliers.edf.com/fichiers/fckeditor/Particuliers/Offres/CGV_CRE/CRE_TB.pdf. The prices seem to go up twice a year, and this summary also itemizes the many taxes charged.

As for heat exchangers for swimming pools, I suspect that to use oil for this purpose would be very expensive. The hot water heating is very much a by-product of the boiler's output, whereas the amount of heat used for a pool is massive by comparison.

Heat pumps, and specifically air-sourced heat pumps, on the other hand, are generally considered excellent investments for pool heating. I don't have a pool, but most people I know with a pool have these. In the summer, when air temperatures are relatively high, there is plenty of heat available in the air to be extracted. In these circumstances, a heat pump can provide 3 to 4 times the amount of heat that is provided as 'fuel', i.e. the electricity it takes to run it. This means that you pay, say, 1.5 KwH on your electricity bill and receive 5 - 6 KwH of heat into your pool. This, of course, is why they're popular.

If this seems hard to believe, whilst not having a pool, my whole house is heated by a heat pump that is rated at 2.2 Kw, operating through underfloor piping downstairs. In my case, this is a ground-source system, as winter air temperatures are simply not high enough to give enough heat. (We live at the foot of the Jura mountains, 600m up.) We installed the system when the house was built, 19 years ago, and it has been worked perfectly ever since, with zero maintenance. On the coldest of winter days, supplementary heat is needed in bathrooms and very occasionally in bedrooms, but we're very happy with its performance. I think the only thing I would do differently would be to have installed tiles downstairs rather than carpets. Carpets definitely keep a lot of heat from reaching the room, and the difference is noticeable in the rooms that are not carpeted.

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To Tony,

A heat exchanger is the traditional method for taking heat from the source and transfering it to the pool. The chemically agressive nature of pool water usually requires this method. It depends of course on the size of the pool and the other equipment available. Technically speaking though it's the equivalent of trying to heat your house with all the doors and windows open so if your boiler is only sized for hot water it won't make much difference and good pool covers are vital.

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We had Tempo for a few years in a rented house, it was what was there. It enabled us to have a significantly cheaper annual bill than our friends. I haven't done anything about converting to that in our current house because there is a charge to install it, and because I want to cut the bills by other means instead. In fact I think that when I first looked at it we didn't have the required power usage, though now we do.

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Tony, The choice of electricity or oil for summer water heating is likely to depend on the electricity tariff that you use and the efficiency of the boiler. A newish boiler and expensive electricity would suggest that the oil route might be better. If you're not normally there in the winter, you could try to get the Tempo tariff from EDF. This significantly cuts the cost of electricity in the summer, and is great if you have a pool. (It has 22 'Red' days per year in the winter, when electricity is wickedly expensive - Heures pleines cost €0.56 per KwH.) In theory, anybody can have Tempo, but it can be a struggle to get them to change your contract to one where they will make less money. Persistence usually pays off, however, - just don't mention that you're not there in the winter.

As for an anti-frost setting for the boiler, have you looked to see if there is a water temperature thermostat on the boiler itself. Clearly, this should be at the lowest possible setting if you're leaving it in the winter, as well as setting the room thermostat at an anti-frost level. Often in such circumstances, the production of some hot water is merely incidental and would use no more oil than is going to be used anyway. As to whether it's worth leaving the system on at all in the winter, that depends on the chance of sustained frost in your locality and on the insulation level of the building, and the pipes. Personally, if I had a traditional boiler/radiator 'wet' central heating system, I wouldn't take any chances in an unoccupied property. Many insurance policies won't pay out if the property isn't occupied for a particular length of time, like one month.

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Well, I now have my efergy e2 system set up and have been monitoring our usage for the past couple of days and it is quite informative. However, the manual makes no sense at all and the system keep refusing me from entering different tariffs for HC and HP. Will stick with it for a while and see if I can enter the data so that it starts reporting on costs. Will update as I progress.

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Well Vic, I doubt you'd save anything changing from one system to another but if you were considering a new setup then listening to the points made could be useful. Sadly with rising costs worrying yourself into an early grave over utility bills when on a pension could be a real problem for some, Off grid is the only answer for electrical items that don't use much power like LED's for lighting etc but heavy usage devices like cookers and heaters would need to be some other source at least for the time being.

Fuel can be saved if people remember water boils at 100 deg C (at sea level) so boiling veg etc on anything but a low heat once the boiling point has been reached is a waste of energy. So are hot water storage vesels but unfortunately the stupid French system is based on potential usage (6kw, 9kw, 12kw etc) so high power instant water heaters are not a good choice for france unless you have expensive deselectors and don't mind other items switching on and off as required.

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A very good point Peter, and it also applies to gas ovens. Gas ovens must leak heat as they require air for combustion, whereas electric ovens can be far better insulated/sealed, retaining the heat for longer so costing less.

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The earlier comments about using gas rings to heat water rather than electric kettles seem to miss the point that electric kettles are almost 100% efficient whereas gas kettles lose a lot of the supplied heat to the surrounding air. If you pay around €25 for 13Kg. of gas, a KwH of gas costs about €0.15, which is very close to the TTC price of full-price (Heures Pleines) electricity. Sure, the wasted heat from using a gas kettle warms the rest of the kitchen, but kitchens are frequently quite hot anyway. Because of the wasted heat, it actually costs significantly more to heat a given amount of water by bottled gas than by full-price electricity.

If you want to save energy when heating water, the key is to make sure that you only heat the amount of water needed, so that you don't heat, say, half a litre of water too much, which is then left to go cold again. One way to avoid this is to install a permanent hot & cold water dispenser as mentioned by Chris Chapman, but only if they don't keep hot a "reserve" of hot water for instant availability. This could waste a significant amount of electricity, which would be even more expensive if it's the sort that also provides chilled water, as that type has a chiller unit as well.

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I agree Mike, without all the facts a guide is all you can give. As I said if it's rented and requires all that energy to heat it move out. I work on modern well insulated apartments and they have the radiators on for around 45 mins in -10 deg for a whole evening. That's a wet system and the rads are equivalent to around 2kw.

If you add the cost of heating to the cost of the rent, finding a better place with lower energy bills may actually produce a net saving

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John, my figures were just to give an idea of costs. During winter heaters would most likely be running 24x7 and not just 7 hours, they may be running at max power all the time of just tick over depending on the size of the apartment and insulation levels, she may need 3kw of heaters and not 1kw etc. There are also the monthly charges and taxes. They asked for a basic idea of costs and that is what I have provided.

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That's an assumption that 1000 watts is used every hour, possibly 2000 watts if both are on. That would be an assumption that the room had a 100% loss of that heat which is unlikely and if it were true, move out! If the thermostats are set then they will only be on 100% when first switched on.

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An example is that at a tarrif of 0.146 Euros per KWH, if she had a 1KW radiator o at full blast for 7 hours per day that would come to 1.0269 Euros per day + taxes and other charges etc, so if she was running 2 x 2kw fires over the period of a month then it would be pretty expensive.