Watt fun: smart meter games

The Green Guy wrote a nice piece for The Guardian last week on using “smart meters” to shave un-needed watts off your electricity use.

Here in relatively eco-conscious Brighton, the smart meter seems to have created a whole new fun-for-all-the-family type game in which you borrow a Wattson, clip the sensor below your electricity meter, and then encourate the entire household to fly around the house figuring off what they can switch off. Really. I know people who are doing this.

I can imagine this leading to all sorts of family frolics: “Your iPod usees more than my Gameboy charger!” “Yeah, but look! Your Barbie Electric Guitar With Sing Along Microphone^TM uses more than the breadmaker…” The downside is it could turn youg children into the eco-Stasi: “Dad? Did you know your electric razor just used a whole three watts?” Etc.

The upside, of course, is that as Adam Vaughn writes, these meters lead to a cut in electricity useage of anything between 3% amd 15% and drive home the realisation that devices that heat things, like kettles and toasters, really do lap up the volts and our homes are full of nasty little things that use electricity without telling us… (the good news is that the Eco kettle saves about 30% on typical usage).

(Maybe I should get a Wattson for the Eco Store to just hire out, a day at a time…)

Photo by jon|k.

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This entry was written by Nigel and posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 10:40 am and filed under Saving energy, Eco products, Co2 emissions, Carbon footprints, Eco bloggers. Bookmark the permalink. You can follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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