Got Power Strips?
I just went online and signed up for the Free Home Energy Assessments from the City of Mountain View. It’s an interactive program just for residents. It allows you to see how much natural gas and electricity your home is using and compare that to everyone else in California. It’s really easy to plug your information in and maneuver around the website. You do need a PG&E account and you need to have lived in your current location for at least one year.
The program asks you questions like how many people, TVs, refrigerators, and computers are in your home. And it looks at information in your PG&E account. It updates itself every month to see if the energy use changes. Now that I saw that my home is a “High Energy” user, I’m determined to keep an eye on things. I like that it told me that my “home” was a high energy user and it didn’t sound like the people that live there are at fault. I’m blaming my home as well. It made recommendations for me to follow, like install 4 power strips, unplug unused devices, and it thinks that my home has an electricity “leak” someplace. It told me that water leaks are easy to spot, but electrical leaks are different and people may never know about them.
It told me that my estimated “standby load” is 354 Watts and that it’s costing me approximately $525 per year. In the natural gas portion of the profile, it told me that the people in my home use 339 “therms” of natural gas per year and that the average participant in the program uses 389.
It also asks about gas mileage of your vehicle and how many miles you drive each day.
One moment that was quite funny to me was the part of the profile that asked me if I owned a “yacht” or a “private aircraft.” No. I don’t have either one of those. I work part time at the Chamber of Commerce and I walk to work as often as I can. I own a bike. And a new pair of walking shoes. Nothing too fancy here.
I found the entire experience interesting and I’ll keep checking back with the website to see if it congratulates me for making changes in the right direction and it if notices now that I started to unplug appliances and electronic equipment that aren’t being use on a regular basis. Thanks EnergyUpgradeMV.org for helping me keep an eye on my energy consumption and for offering me tips on how to lower my bills. I love Mountain View.
Energy Upgrade MV is available to all MV residents whether you live in an apartment, condo, house etc. If you pay your own PG&E bill you probably already have a SmartMeter installed. Homes and buildings with Solar PV do not have SmartMeters.
We got the “Smart Strips” and if you turn off the main item, and you aren’t using the other items plugged in, the strip knows and it turns off all the power to everything. It’s as it you had unplugged at 5 devices, but the strip did it for you. They’re the newest thing in power strips.
Nice post. Curious: what was the benefit of installing power strips?
Thanks Andrew!
If your PG+E service has been upgraded with a SmartMeter, you can check out a site like lowfoot.com also. It will log into your PG+E account to track and graph your smart meter data. It is a community-type site where people share power-saving ideas.
The Smart Meter data comes in once or twice a day and is at an hourly level of granularity, but is about one day behind. So you can get a good picture about how the things you did yesterday (Ran the dryer, AC, etc) affected your hourly usage. You can set energy reduction targets and the quick feedback helps you manage to those goals.
I think you have to have one of those smart meters in order for them to watch how much power you used. Do you have one of those things outside your apartment?
Does this work for those who work in apartment complexes as well?