Oct

20

I am an IAMS cat

14 years ago, mid-October | 1 Comment

After an eternity of waiting Current Cost have finally made their IAMS available to buy. One might have expected a fanfare, we’ve been waiting for these for over a year now, but there was nothing, no blog post, no tweet, nada. Thankfully Kevin Turner (@netcompsys) spotted them for sale. For those not familiar with the IAMS (Individual Appliance Monitors) when used in conjunction with a Current Cost monitor (compatible with Trec, Envi, EnviR ,EnviRW) an IAM allows you to measure the electricity usage for an appliance. Multiple IAMS can be used with a single monitor to give you an overview of your total usage.
As you can see from the graphs at the bottom of this post there’s clearly something not quite right with my fridge-freezer. Every hour for half an hour it uses 400 Watts. Lets do a couple of calculations and find out what this really means in electricity usage and how much money I’m frittering away.

        400 / 2 == 200 (Watts per hour) - half 

        24 * 0.2 == 4.8 (kWh)

        4.8 * 365.25 == 1753 (kWh per year)


You read that right. It’s using 4.8kWh a day! Most modern fridge freezers use around 300kWh a year, depending on their size, and I’m using nearly six (6) times that. Let’s say I’m paying 12.5 pence per kWh. In one year my current fridge-freezer is costing me £219.13 versus £39.50 if I were to buy a new one – that’s £179.63 difference. If I pick a new fridge-freezer that uses less than 300kWh a year the saving increases. I could almost buy a new fridge freezer each year with the money I’m wasting!

As you can see, being able to measure what’s going on by using the IAMS has highlighted that I really need to replace my existing fridge freezer with something much more efficient.

Taking another look at the graph you can see one other area that needs to be looked at. Those computers are eating a lot of electricity. Only this morning did I get round to plugging my laptop into an IAM to measure it’s power use. 45W .. all day .. every day.. Let’s just say that it’s prime for replacement but also that it does now get powered off when it’s not being used.

So, get measuring and get saving!

Electricity 3 hourElectricity 6 hourElectricity 12 hourCurrent Cost IAMS



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October 20, 2010 13:13


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  1. Widget, it’s got a widget… : ..the cat came back.. on May 20, 2011 21:14

    […] I am an IAMS cat […]

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