Mr. Electricity is your guide to saving energy in your home.
We're recommended by the government of Berks County, PA.
Related sites:
Watt Watt. News about efficiency and conservation, written by readers of the site.
Home Power Magazine. All about renewable energy for the home.
Thin House. Blog about a family committed to cutting its energy use by 80%.
No-Impact Man. Blog about a family striving to have no net impact. (i.e., What little they use, they offset.) Inspirational.
Off-Grid. News and resources about living without being connected to a utility company.
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If you like this site, you might also like some of my
other sites:
Battery
Guide
Which battery is best? We cover
rechargeable and alkaline batteries to show you what's hot,
what's not, and the best way to charge them. (visit
now)
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The
Military Budget as Cookies
This excellent animation from TrueMajority shows in
graphic detail (using Oreo cookies) how ridiculously, large
the military budget is, and how we could solve many domestic
problems with a modest 12% cut. A must-see. (watch
it now)
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Questions about
Electric Meters
(I have a separate page how
to clock your electric meter to see how much electricity
something uses.)
Where does electric go after it
passes through any appliance in my home? I have often heard
it returns to the grid? Isn't that silly! I'm lost!
-- Big Bad Barry,
Pennsylvania, Jan. 2005
This doesn't really havy anything to do with
saving electricity but it gives me an excuse to use a
good analogy I came up with.
Pretend a giant is sitting in the yard at the power
plant. Or it can be Shrek if you prefer. Also pretend
that instead of electrical wire, we use dental floss. The
giant is holding a piece of dental floss in one hand, and
that leads to your house, through your house, then back
out to the power plant and into the giant's other hand.
So you've got a giant holding an enormous strand of
dental floss that forms a complete loop, starting in one
hand and ending in the other. With me so far? Good.
Okay, so now the giant pulls on one end of the floss.
As he does that one hand comes towards him and the other
goes away from him. Then he pulls on the other end to do
the opposite. Pretend he's exercising with the floss. He
does this really fast, reversing direction 120 times per
second, or 60 times per second if you count doing both
directions as one set.
That's how household electricity works. It doesn't
start at the power plant, run through your house, and
then go back to the power plant. Instead what's happening
is the power plant is pushing electrons down one end of
the wire, then they reverse it and push from the other
end. The electrons in the wire get rubbed back and forth,
like a scrub brush. This is what transfers energy to the
appliances you're running.
Does my meter charge me for
volts or for watts? Do higher voltage appliances cost more
to run? -- Various
readers
The electric company charges you for watt-hours,
not volts. To figure volts you use the fomula
Volts x Amps = Watts. A device that
runs on 240V will use half as many amps as an identical
device that runs at 120V, so the wattage will be the same
-- and so will the cost.
The kinds of appliances that use 240V tend to
be energy hogs, like air conditioners and electric
clothes dryers, so running those appliances will cost
you. It's not because 240V costs more, it's because
you're running energy-gobbling appliances.
If you read all this and you think that 240V costs
more than 120V then you didn't read carefully enough and
should re-read the above.
Question: I just noticed today
that my electric meter is not spinning at all. I don't know
how long this has been going on and we are in the middle of
a billing cycle. I was definitely using electricity in the
house when I happened to notice the meter (heater was on,
computers, lights, etc.) What should I do?
-- T. Allen, Ft. Worth, Texas
Contact your utility company.
I'm using your
formula for looking at my electric meter to measure the
usage of my appliances, and
I'm wondering what is the 7.2 on the meter, and the 3.6
multiplier, and why divide by seconds? I'm sure my neighbors
think I've been in the sun too long since I'm running in and
out of the house reading my meter.
-- David Jones,
Scottsdale, AZ, Aug. 2002
(1) Different meters spin at different rates, so
that's why you use the kH factor specific to your meter.
The kH factor is basically the size of your meter.
(2) You divide by seconds because you're measuring the
energy used for a specific amount of time. If you didn't
include the time in the equation, the number you got
would be meaningless. (If the answer was "400
watt-hours", would that be every 12 seconds, every four
hours, or every three months?)
(3) The 3.6 is to put your answer in the form of
kilowatt-hours. Without the 3.6 you have the
number of watt-seconds. Here's how it works:
There are 3600 seconds in one hour (60 seconds x 60
minutes). So multiplying your answer by 3600 would give
you the amount of electricity for an hour. But it would
still be in the form of watt-hours, not kilowatt-hours.
To convert to kilowatt-hours you divide by 1000. So all
in all you're multiplying by 3600 and dividing by 1000.
Note that 3600/1000 is 3.6, so our shortcut for
multiplying by 3600 and dividing by 1000 is to just
multiply by 3.6. [Thanks to reader Jim Haywood for
figuring out what the 3.6 is for.]
My power bill doubled in
kilowatt hours and I cannot figure out why (8kWh in March
2002, to 15kWh in March 2003). This surprised me because I
have not been using my heat or air conditioning and my
habits have not changed. My place is just a simple
one-bedroom apartment. I had maintenance check out my hot
water heater and refrigerator to make sure they were working
properly and they said everything was fine. I called my
power company and they came out to check the meter, and they
said everything was fine. Then I find out my neighbor's
power bill has also doubled to $211 (she lives across the
hall from me). Do you think there is a problem with my
meter-- Kate Baumann, April 2003
It's hard to say exactly where the problem is
until you test it, but it's possible that the
problem is with the meter. You can definitely test the
meter, but there's a bit of work involved.
First, turn off every circuit breaker in your
apartment and then see if your meter is still spinning.
If so, your meter is definitely broken. I would first
videotape your turning the breakers off and that the
meter still spins so you have evidence in case you have a
hard time getting a refund from your electrical utility
for being overcharged.
If the meter stopped cold when you turned off all the
breakers, then turn them back on again, but turn off and
UNPLUG everything in your home. If there's no switch for
the electric hot water heater, then keep the heater's
breaker off. Make sure the meter is still stopped cold.
If it's spinning again, turn off all the breakers again,
and then turn them back on one at a time to isolate which
one is causing the meter to spin. Once you've isolated
that breaker, see if there's a device that's plugged in
or a light that's turned on that's eating up power. If
you're convinced that there is nothing that should be
drawing power, your meter may be broken. Videotape as
suggested above and contact your electric utility.
If you can get the meter to stop cold with the
breakers on, then turn one item back on, like a light,
and then look at the meter to measure
how much electricity it's using. If the meter says
it's using more than about 20% of what it should be
using, then there may be a problem with your meter.
If the light measures correctly, then turn it off, and
start turning on other items and measuring them. At this
point your assumption is that the meter is correct, but
that one of your devices is drawing more than it should,
such as your hot water heater or your refrigerator.
Good luck, and let me know what you find out!
I've been trying to figure out
why I consume so much power each month (950 kWh), since I'm
not at home much, my refrigerator is new, and the AC is
barely run. I unplugged everything (not just turned them
off) but my electric meter was still spinning at about 1 rpm
(~400 watts). So then I cut all the breakers off, but
the meter was still spinning! Could the meter be
broken? If it is, who would I contact about that? If I can
prove to the electric company that it has been broken since
I bought my house will they refund my money?
-- Shaun Cooley, CA, July 2001
[I suggested that Shaun first document the
problem with a video camera and have a licensed
electrician confirm the problem, so that he had proof,
and THEN contact his electric utility company. The
electric utility said the meter was broken and put in a
new one, but refused to refund the money he paid for
electricity he never used. His only option for getting a
refund at that point would be to take them to court or
seek arbitration; I don't know if he ever did.]
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