We try an energy monitoring plug at home
There are lots of different models out there, but our Ecommerce Writer Molly Cleary used one, £19.75 at Amazon). She says the instructions aren't incredibly useful, and that you need to find out what your unit rate is for electricity and then enter it in. But otherwise, it was straightforward to use.
Amy Lockwood
Amy Lockwood is Decor Editor at Ideal Home, offering advice on creating your dream interior, whether that's choosing the perfect shade of paint, investing in a new sofa, or sourcing on-trend and sustainable products for the home.
As part of her work on the Ideal Home team, Amy has tested everything from electric blankets and heated clothes airers to sofas and Christmas trees.
Amy and Molly spent about a week putting their energy monitoring plugs to the test to see if it helped them save energy at home. They tested them at the end of September, just before the October rise in the energy price cap. Here's what they found out.
What used the most energy?
- The kettle – 5-6p a go, £100+ a year
Amy: 'It takes my 2500-3000W kettle 2.45 mins to boil 4 cups of water at a cost of 6p. That means if I boil the kettle 6 x per day, every day, that's around £130 a year.'
Molly: 'My kettle has 2200W of power and cost 5p to boil at full capacity (1.6L). After one day of testing, I found that we had spent 28p boiling the kettle. So I think that's just over £100 a year, meaning my kettle is more efficient than Amy's.' - The toaster – 2p per crumpet
Amy's 950W toaster cost 2p to toast a crumpet for 3 minutes, so if we're making a lot of toast every morning this could soon add up more than we might have expected.
What used the least?
- Electric blanket
Amy's 70W electric blanket cost 3p an hour at the maximum temperature. - Lamp
Amy's lamp didn't nudge into 1p after an hour of it being turned on. - Heated drying rack
Molly's heated drying rack cost 6p an hour to run. 'It has this written all over the box so was nice to discover that it was true,' she says.
Were there any surprises?
It turns out that charging our phones isn't as expensive as we might have thought. 'My phone doesn't last a day without charging anymore so I thought that would be a big cost,' says Amy. 'But at only 4W it didn't even nudge into 00.01 after 4 hours of charging.'
'This might be steeper than expected because my air fryer is quite big (7L),' she says. But it goes to show that it's worth using your air fryer instead of the oven where possible, as an oven costs roughly 34p every 20 minutes, so three times more than an air fryer.
If you feel in the dark about how much your appliances are costing you, an energy monitoring plug could be a great money-saver. Will you be picking one up?
A very informative report, I have times in which I use my most expensive items, like the washing machine and oven, weekends is the time when everyone uses these things! We try to avoid 10am-2pm and 6pm - 10pm very expensive!
The blog song for today is: "Alfie"by Lily Allen
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