(NECN: Peter Howe, Stow/Newton, Mass.) If in these tough economic times you pay attention to the cost of electricity, you probably have a sense you pay a lot for air conditioning, or the old second fridge in the basement, or all the computers and television sets you leave on standby instead of turning them fully off.
Now you can find out -- in dollars and cents -- exactly how many dollars you'd save shutting them off, and where to best target your cost-cutting efforts, thanks to a new energy-monitoring system developed by a New England company.
Self-employed software engineer Erik Haugsjaa says when he and his wife and two sons moved to a new neighborhood in Stow, "We wanted to build a 'green' house, which to us means an energy-efficient house.'' Haugsjaa didn't do anything halfway with his family's now five-month-old home: 16-inch-thick, quadruple-insulated walls, solar panels on a perfectly south-facing roof that produce more power for the town municipal electric utility than the Haugsjaa family draws from the town grid.
And his secret weapon: A system called eMonitor in the basement that senses, circuit by circuit, exactly how much power every appliance and room is using. Offering a pie-chart breakdown that shows the current cost per month of power flowing through every circuit in his circuit-breaker box, it answers questions like "should I turn off my computer at night, or printer, when I'm not using it? Things like that can end up making a big difference,'' Haugsjaa said.
Marty Flusberg, CEO of Powerhouse Dynamics in Newton, Mass., which makes eMonitor and began full commercial sales of it last spring, said, "We've heard anecdotes of people that have saved 30 or 35 percent" off their electric bills using the system.
Pointing to a website display of energy use at the home of an actual customer in Hopkinton, Mass., Flusberg shows how the family uses, for example, $34 a month on the basement office computer and $28 for the clothes dryer. Pointing to another bar on the chart, Flusberg explains, "This is his utility-room refrigerator. This is where he cools his beer -- and he was very surprised to discover that he's spending 29 dollars a month just to cool his beer.'' He adds that "there's no way of knowing that unless you're monitoring at a circuit level.''
The eMonitor system isn't cheap -- beginning at $499 plus the cost of professional installation by an electrician or dealer, who attaches a sheaf of sensors to circuits passing through the breaker box and links them to a computer.
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But for people with big electric bills and a willingness to take aggressive steps to reduce power consumption, Flusberg estimates eMonitor can pay for itself in 2 to 3 years, and in many parts of the country, utilities will offer homeowners subsidies to install it as a way of reducing overall demand on power grids.
The developer who built Erik's house, Carter Scott of Transformations Inc., is now in the process of building out an entire 41-home subdivision in Townsend, Mass., where, through solar energy and superinsulation other sources homes produce 60 to 100 percent of the energy they consume. With a grant from an environmental foundation, Scott has installed an eMonitor in one of the homes, and likes what he sees. "With the eMonitor, you can plug in each one of the circuits in the house and see what the whole house is doing,'' Scott said. "We're hoping with eMonitor that we can get people to further reduce their energy consumption.''
Erik Haugsjaa said it's been an eye-opener for him. "When you start looking at it on the web page, you start to realise, wow, if I turn this off at night, that's the same as adding another solar panel. It can pay off, depending on your family, pretty quickly.''
There are also side benefits to this like, you can set eMonitor to send you an alarm if you leave a computer on for more than say 24 hours, and you can see if you're close to overloading a circuit in your home and thereby risking a fire.
And if like so many of us you obsess over whether you shut the stove off at home before you left for work -- you can set eMonitor to send you an email or text message if your electric stove or oven stays on for too long.
It's probably not a cost-effective system for all or even most homeowners, but for people with a big house, big bills, a pool, or something else that consumes a lot of electricity, eMonitor can be an interesting and effective way to get a real handle on what specific acts of conservation will really add up to.
With videographer Mike Bellwin
