A start of my Electrical Power Inventory

If you recall from a few posts back, we have grown a $100 a month electric bill. This is way more than we expect it to be, and I am going to get a handle on where it comes from.

I have started a small spreadsheet that I will eventually share with you. I am going to itemize all power usage in our hose....room by room. In each room of the house I will be taking an inventory of all applainces and estimate their hourly usage.

So here are a few examples of measurements I took with my new Kill-A-Watt tool. (I have taken many more, but don't feel like typing them)

• Sylvania 60W Soft White Bulb - 57 watts
• Commercial Electric 60W CFL Bulb - 23 watts
• 17" Hitachi Superscan Elite 630 Monitor - 68W Idle/77W Full Power
• Athalon 1.2GHz PC - 4W Powered off/90W Operating
• Motorola 505101 Surfboard Cable Router - 5 Watts

So I am going to finish the spreadsheet and see if it makes sense. In techie fasion, I will create a parato of device usage which will allow us to go after the heavy hitters in order to get the biggest bang for the effort first.

PS: For example, from the small bit of data above, one thing I learned to do....at least shutting down the monitors on our running computers every night. I suspect that investing in a network disk or making one computer a sort of data server might be the next step....but I have to be careful with data back-up and availibility. (which of course if a huge advantage of having many systems on all the time) Then there is the issue of all the automatic updates these computers do at night....like downloading podcasts and the like....so I don't see all the computers being shut down. (but some sort of mirroring arragement might make sense for a sort of instant "back-up")

So many possibilities.... (saving money isn't always easy I guess)