Monday, April 26, 2010

Measure it and you'll be careful using it

We have friends visiting South Florida on their way back to their home/farm on a mountain in the DR and off the grid. They live there self-sufficiently, local materials, solar panel, chickens, garden, the whole nine yards. They've let me borrow a electrical meter they own. It measures the wattage drawn by an electrical appliance/device. 
I have been collecting the water used to wash hands and rinse dishes in the kitchen sink.  Just by merely measuring, I use less. It's the equivalent to calorie counting. Count them as you go and you eat less.
The last couple of days I've measured everything with a plug and attaching a sticky note with the watt usage so I'll remember.  For comparison- My mostly new printer uses 50 watts when ON. My lamp, using a CFL bulb, draws 39 watts.  My window AC unit draws 87 when it's a fan, but when it's an AC it draws 550.
Also, I checked the watts used by my computer (13" macbook.)  At a party on Sunday, someone wondered if it would use more in different operations. It does increase to 220 watts when opening a new program but then it settles into it's normal "Im charging while you're using me" range of 185 watts. It doesn't matter how many tabs I have open or how many different programs were running, just when a new one launched.  When charging in sleep mode it drew differing levels depending the various ways I left it. And when the charger was only plugged into the wall and wasn't attached to the computer (so doing nothing basically) it drew 6 watts.  [None of this was done scientifically!}

I didn't pull out the refrigerator.... hmmm maybe tomorrow.

The garden is doing very well.  More experiments, more lessons.  I'll post more tomorrow.

Info on the meter- This one is called AmWatt appliance load tester by Reliance Controls.
If you write with requests soon, I'll measure before I send it back.