House 2 - 2009 Initial Electricity Survey Notes
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The initial 2009 electricity of the new house was done in December. In preparation a walk around looking at things that use electricity indicates there could be some big opportunities to save money and electricity especially on lighting. The first survey has quite a few gaps which will be plugged over the first couple of months of 2010..
1. To get an idea of the current electricity consumption in what is the worst time of the year for electricity use we are not planning to make many changes till the new year.
2. We are already recording electricity use weekly, this started at the beginning of November. The frequency will be dropping to fortnightly after Christmas 2009.
3. The main rooms have large numbers of spotlights in each of various types, most fairly modern. For example the lounge has 9 ceiling mounted spots and the kitchen has 6.
4. There are odd energy saving bulbs in some rooms but most are incandescent types of one sort or another..
5. There is outside lighting which needs a full investigation for safety as well as power consumption.
6. There could well be quite a few items using electricity which are not so obvious e.g. mains powered smoke detectors, bells, alarm system, etc- so a good check for hidden consumers has been done - the items are now identified but not all quantified..
7. Water heating is via the oil central heating so we will need to look at whether we want to change electricity tariff from single rate to something else and use electric water heating overnight in the summer. This would increase electricty consumption but any increase would be offset by savings in oil use.
8. The position of some light switches means some lights are liable to be left switched on when not required.
9. One bathroom has electric under floor heating, with no experience of this it needs a careful look at.
10. One bathroom has an electric power shower so we will need to look at alternatives here.
11. Changes to lights will involve changes to the fittings as well as bulbs as we make changes to suit our own tastes.
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