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Monitoring your energy use - TrIsCo and other schemes

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Tue, 2010-10-19 13:26
#1
chris holloway
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Joined: 10 Jan 2009
Monitoring your energy use - TrIsCo and other schemes

Hi. Are you monitoring your electricity with an OWL meter, or writing down your gas and/or electricity meter readngs or bills? Are you doing it by yourself, or as part of the TrIsCo OWL-loan system, or part of the Fordington Avenue neighbour group?

However you're doing it, this is a forum to share tips, ideas, questions.

If you get stuck with your OWL, Andy Prestidge at the WinACC office can probably help.

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Tue, 2010-10-26 10:35
#2
andrew.prestidge
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Joined: 20 Sep 2010
It Starts!
Hello folks,
I have now started the monitoring of my house properly as of Monday 25th October. As I had previously discussed via email, I had used the energy meter to, albeit very breifly, monitor the energy use of both my parents and my girlfriend's parents home. It was good to see what an "average" night in uses it various homes. Also quite amazing when both mothers started cooking, to see the pence per hour shoot up by over 20p and hour. My reflection on that however was only 20p an hour to run an oven, electricity is far too cheap!
 
But as I say I have now linked the monitor up in the house I am living, reset the OWL monitor and started the two weeks of not doing anything differently. Well I say that, I’m not, as over the last couple of months I have been much more aware of my electricity consumption, turning things off at the wall etc. So I have regressed to what I was doing a few months ago to truly see how bad I was and then weeks 3 & 4 I will make all the energy saving changes. It was also due to the fact I kept coming home to find the house running at 0W, apparently, even with the fridge plugged in! How could you improve on a potential baseline of 0W?!
 
Out of curiosity I also took a meter reading, of both gas and electric, so I can compare the cumulative data of the OWL meter and to have some sense of the use of gas in the house.
 
During the meeting there was some discussion about the OWL monitors being used in conjunction with PV cells or other domestic renewables. I contacted the manufacturer and they stated that the OWL monitor has not got the capacity to calculate the net use of electricity consumed/produced/fed back to the grid. If you were to connect the OWL meter in the wrong way it will add up all the electricity consumed from the grid and all the electricity supplied back to grid in one meaningless number! You can use it to calculate electricity generated OR electricity consumed. To get the consumption you will need to attach it on the live cable entering the fuse box.
 
One assumes that if you have an array with an inverter there would be some form of meter monitoring the consumption at all times with it. You could write down readings from that and compare it with the OWL monitor readings to then work out what you are consuming from the grid.
 
I shall write an update when its coming up to the second phase of the scheme, and use it to discuss any issues that anyone has raised. Equally if people have yet to install theirs or are having issues getting the right settings they want please let me know, and we will try and assist you either remotely or in person.

Andy

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