Here at R29, we love being green. It’s something we believe is at the heart of responsibility in this world. We have been tracking our recycling, print usage, and carbon footprint for several years now, and in doing so have found that one area we could improve upon is electricity usage.
For example, the average American household uses 908 kWh per month of electricity (source). The average household in Illinois uses less than that – about 728 kWh per month. Last year our average monthly usage was 1,856.5 kWh (and the year before that was even higher). Now, granted, we have more employees with more electricity demand than a household has, but we don’t think we necessarily need more than double the amount of electricity, do we?
There’s only one way to find out.
In order to do that, we recently purchased an electricity monitor to help us in this endeavor. If we can get real-time feedback on our electricity usage, it will be easier to change our habits and reduce electricity waste (and money!). Current Cost made it easy to get up and running with monitoring our electricity usage, which we’ve been doing for about the past 2.5 weeks. Our electricity usage data is automatically uploaded to the web every 5 minutes for us to view. Each day’s chart has been overlaid in the image above to give you the average idea of how our power usage goes. In the past two and a half weeks, so far we’ve learned:
- Our programmable thermostat is indeed working (we weren’t so sure)
- It seems most of the spikes in energy occur because of the air conditioning
- We have about 600 watts of power always on. If we could eliminate that 600 watts, we could save about $560 per year (although we can’t completely eliminate it, we could reduce it if we find what’s causing the drain)
And so we begin our journey into electrical awareness and reducing our consumption. Will you join us?
- View our live electricity usage any time here
- Consider joining us in our endeavor – we’d love to hear how your office is reducing electricity usage.