Monitoring electricity consumption home and office: applications and digital tools for monitoring
From the meters to the app, the digital tools help monitor their consumption at home and at work, with savings of 15% of energy bills a year.
How can I control energy consumption and regulate me to save? According to an American study, have the ability to monitor and then possibly adjust their consumption of energy reduces the demand to the point of being able to avoid the construction of new plants. The project - which lasted a year - is the U.S. Department of Energy, and was conducted by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. It was established that the digital equipment for the control of consumption can cut your bills by 15% per year. Translated, this means that in 20 years it would save 70 billion of spending on new power plants and infrastructure, avoiding emissions and costs equivalent to 30 large coal-fired plants.
Such savings are possible is because consumers realize how much can be affected by bad habits - the researchers said - but also a kind of placebo effect that leads us to changes in behavior when we are controlled. It is the same principle that, for example, makes walking more if you use a pedometer. However, the savings for families, society and the environment is really important.
Recently, French households were given a free kit of instruments that measure the consumption of water and electricity. The devices are a watt meter and one flow, and could lead to a radical change in domestic habits. The families in fact - announced l 'Agence Parisienne du Climat - spend especially for heating (60-70% of total), then for the hot water (10%) and electricity (13%).
We are not so lucky, but - given the advantages - we can get yourself these counters that, in real time, reveal to us every day how many watts we consumed, how much they cost and how much carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere. They cost from 10 to 100 Euros about and work in a very simple way. Typically, simply attach the sensor to the cable connecting the meter to the system of the house. The sensor probe monitors the passage total energy used in our home and then, thanks to a wireless transmitter, the data is sent to the monitor. This will immediately understand, for example, it affects the spending power of the washing machine in different time slots, how much it costs the baked sea bass or impact on the environment as downloading a movie. Clearly, it will be so automatic check off which sources of energy and also which are active in vain. The more advanced models also warn of possible dangers of power surge.
Other tools allow you to monitor a single device at a time to understand in detail what consumes during the day or according to our use: a computer during a download, a printer in stand-by mode, the dishwasher in eco mode. It is a trivial socket, a kind of adapter to be inserted between the plug and the wall, able to count the electrical flow that crosses it.
Some energy providers Stano is moving to provide similar services for free and with only the help of a smartphone. If you've been thinking of switching to the free market, given that the supplier has provided Eon Energy Mobile, an app that monitors in real time the supply of electricity and gas, plus a list of tips to reduce waste. The application - compatible with all mobile operating systems - among other things also provides an archive of bills, self-reading gas consumption (the latter function is also possible for users Enel and also a graph of the emissions CO 2 that can be avoided with renewable energy. A scoring system based on the savings achieved over the previous year then puts together game and competition to get even more in terms of efficiency and cost savings.'s best performance, as Always check through your mobile phone, will be entitled to a prize. Gambling and energy saving are the rest down a winning team in the United States, where it is the software company Opower has launched an app for Facebook that puts people in competition with their friends to see who is better at reducing fuel consumption, with the collaboration of 16 utilities that provide the relevant data.
Facebook is available then, even from us, an app that quantifies the consumption of the home and identifies weaknesses, the ones where you can save. They fit the data needed to determine the energy class or office and it is estimated the savings that could be achieved with such interventions.
A service similar to that of Eon to users of Energrid. The app Contacorrente 2.0 allows monitoring of consumption and spending every minute on your smartphone. You can also receive an email with a daily report, weekly or monthly basis to quantify the benefits over time. If power is exceeded then an alert is sent via SMS or email. Among the app free and independent energy suppliers, we mention Greendrops, able to calculate our carbon footprint by entering values in the consumption of electricity and gas.
There are many interesting applications if you have a photovoltaic system on the roof. Just a moment to keep under control the production of electricity, any failures, malfunctions of the panels or rendering problems, data related to the power, temperature, current and voltage input / output and also periodic reports of efficiency. More Apps can help you understand if the PV does for us, and then estimate the benefits by calculating the solar radiation in the area and then provide the best angle for the panels. You can also calculate the potential annual energy yield as well as the CO2 savings.
10/09/2012
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Translated via software
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Source:
Italian version of ReteArchitetti.it