Always Read The Label

In the year 2000 our household decided we had to do something about the ever rising cost of living. Our first step was an electricity audit. We listed  every appliance in the house that used electricity and the power required to run it.

The most amazing discovery we made concerned the two TVs in the house, we had an 18” and a 14” TV. The 18” drew 40 watts, but the 14” drew 60 watts. The bigger TV gave us a bigger picture for less power. It was a valuable lesson, always read the label and ever since when buying electrical appliances we have always checked how much power the machine uses.

This quite simple to do, on the back of all electrical appliances is a label or a plate, the key figure is watts. If watts aren’t there look for volts and amps, multiply volts by amps and you get watts. A 1000 watt appliance will use one kWh or one unit of electricity if ran for one hour.

We replaced the 60 watt 14” TV ten years ago with a 30 watt 14” TV. We got exactly the same service from the new TV but at half the power consumption. Memory fails me and I can’t recall how much we paid for the 30 watt TV, but I am confident the investment made to save that 30 watts has long repaid itself.

We took other measures, like making sure no appliances were left on standby, loading the washing machine fully, turning off lights and constantly thinking about how we were using power. Combined these measures in one month, cut our electricity consumption by one third, from about 300 kWh per month to 200 kWh per month.

In the following months we replaced our light bulbs and other inefficient appliances and continued to think actively about how we used power. Six months later we had reduced our power consumption to about 100 kWh per month. We had exactly the same services but were achieving this with one third the electricity.