Energy Management - The Audit by Chris Mason

For the past few articles, I have talked about renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, and the importance of adopting them in order to reduce our reliance on oil. With the current status of grid interactive systems legislation in Anguilla, there is presently no easy way to use renewable energy for the homeowner, leaving no renewable energy option for reducing energy bills. Hopefully we will see change in this area as the economic situation forces us to explore our alternatives.

But all is not lost. The homeowner has the option to implement some measures to reduce their use of energy, some which are very cost effective. In a series of articles we will explore the different options for Caribbean homes and businesses wishing to reduce their energy costs.

The first step in any program ought to be an energy audit. While this sounds very technical, really anyone can carry out an audit. Take a spreadsheet or ruled notebook and record all your electrical appliances and loads such as water pumps, refrigerators, TVs and light fittings. Read the power rating of each device and record that with the number of hours it is likely to run per day. Then compare your estimated consumption with your electricity bill, if you are close then you have been successful. Revise until you have a good handle on where your money is going.

One tremendously useful resource is provided for free by Anglec themselves. Your account is available online which will allow you to follow your power usage without having to collect and type up your paper bills and the information is available for many previous months to help you establish historical information. As an aside, since the Government has vowed to reduce electricity costs, here's an opportunity to reduce the cost of producing the bills and therefore pass on that saving to consumers. Paper bills are so yesterday and use scarce wood resources, make a big mess and have to be dumped, taking up expensive landfill resources. At present, out of date legislation requires Anglec to mail a paper bill to every consumer, even if they do not want it.

Another useful item n our quest to understand our consumption is an energy monitor. Once terribly expensive and beyond the reach of the consumer, we discovered and sell a small wireless unit for about $200 that will give you instantaneous consumption data and stores the readings for download to your computer. The Efergy E2 will even tell you the value of the electricity you are consuming in real time, which is very helpful when trying to identify your loads. You get pretty graphs showing you what time of day you use the most power, very helpful information.
It is critical to have a baseline measurement against which you can compare savings. If your monthly consumption is approximately steady, then you have a good baseline and can see any improvements and feel the benefits. Knowing you are saving money every month is tremendously important to maintaining the program. Look at your KWh, the amount of electricity consumed, rather than the cost, as fuel costs vary monthly.

Once you know where your power is going, you can begin to identify ways to reduce consumption. It is generally better to take the "low hanging fruit" first, by which I mean you should make the easiest, least costly and most effective changes first. Let's look at what are usually the easiest changes to make.

Lighting: Tunsten lamps are very inefficient, horrendously in fact. They turn about 2% of the electricity they use into light, and the rest goes into heat, something we don't need any more of. They should be the first to go. As you might have realized from previous columns, I believe in "walking the walk", that you can't talk about a technology until you have tried it and lived with it. It drives my family nuts that they are constantly the object of an experiment but they suffer my investigations with some amusement. In the last few months, we have replaced almost all our lighting with either LED lamps or compact fluorescents, with varying success. I found an MR16 lamp that has the most beautiful light quality I have seen, and I am sold on these units. At 5W per lamp, the savings over 25W halogen is significant, especially if you use lots of downlights and feature lights.

LED is still a young technology, I would try one lamp before committing to a large scale replacement program as there is a lot of poor quality units on the market. When LED is good, it is very, very good and I think will supplant all other residential lighting in time.

CFLs or Compact Fluorescents should make up the balance of your lighting, they are mature and work very well but suffer to a certain extend from poor colour rendition and start times, although they are much better than they used to be. By the time you have completed your lighting program, the only tungsten (traditional) light bulb in your house should be the refrigerator light. However, you should start with the lighting fixtures that get used the most. Changing the lamp in a closet that is turned on for a minute a day does not make economic sense.

Set yourself and your family a realistic target to reach to make saving energy fun and remember that money saved is the same as money earned.

Next Article: Energy Management II: Air Conditioning