Office is Ready for Wedding Season

It is spring again!  Spring can mean different things to different people and to me it is always the start of the busiest time of the year in my business calender.  This is because the wedding season has started and just around the corner is Christmas.

To prepare for this Spring, regular readers might recall my huge office clean out.  I felt it was time to do a massive clean up of everything we simply didn’t need any more and hence was ‘hogging’ space.  Being a passionate Ebay hater, I again turned to Freecycle.org to give everything away instead of using up my valuable energy and time trying to sell it (i.e. Ebay).

The really cool thing about Freecycle is as the giver, you can select who gets your stuff.  I had a young photography student claim most of the photography equipment.  An Aborigine artist claimed many of my large studio picture frames.  The clean up of my books went to a single dad with two teenage children. 

All in all I gave away items that I could of got perhaps $800 – $1500 on Ebay.  However by giving away on Freecycle I got so much more!  Also I noticed that my personal ‘energy bank’ was not empty after the exercise like it often was from participating in Ebay auctions.  Not only did I feel good for having given everything away but also I have noticed the energy in the office has been more relaxed and positive.

Now that everything was gone I was inspired to rearrange the office (as I had not wasted my time or energy on Ebay).  The really cool thing about this story is after finishing moving the office furiture around we noticed that we were now able to open the windows and let more nature light into the front room office.  So now on a bright day, we no longer even need to turn the down lights on – now we simply open the blinds and let the sunshine in.

Looking at our wireless energy meter we had installed thanks to Sydney City Council we discovered that we are saving approx 1.11 Kwh each day by not turning on our office down lights (this is an estimation as on some days we still need to turn lights on i.e. overcast days and when we need brighter light for retouching photographic work etc).

Ironically my personal energy was not the only energy saved in giving away everything.

Food for thought.

 

Down lights in my office, turned off as the window lets in sunlight now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mini my dog sitting on me while I try to take the photograph of the office down lights.

 

Sydney’s Home Energy Consumption Trial

On an earlier post, I mentioned that my household is taking part of Sydney’s Home Energy Consumption Trial.  The trial is limited to 100 households within the City of Sydney Local Government area.

According to information I have received, the key objective of the trial is to educate household members about the operating costs of electrical appliances and to encourage energy efficiency within the home.

Last week an electrician came out to install the energy monitor.  One part of the monitor system is connected to our switch board which was hardly noticeable (see below before and after shots).  The other part of the monitor system was a small hand held wireless energy monitor.

 

Our household energy switch board

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Our household energy switch board after installation of energy monitor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With this wireless monitor we are able to freely move around the home with it in hand, turning appliances on and off and see straight away how much energy that appliance is using .

The monitor will remain in our home for the next twelve months and over that time we will be able to see our energy usage as cents per hour or kWh per hour or Kg green house gas per hour.  Also there is a ongoing meter that shows how much up to current time we have used as well as comparing weeks, months, quarters and even years.  There is no hiding from the results.  What energy we use over this time is added to the total usage.

Now we as a household will know exactly what energy we are currently using.  Then we can start to look at what can be done to lower our usage…..and we are already doing this.

The electrician who installed our monitor system said that we already had a reasonably low energy usage but I know we can be so much better.

Taking the handheld wireless monitor into our home office, I did a little test with the down lights.

 

Taken in our home office with down lights on (also in the home the fridge and phone system are on and computers are on hibernate).  It is costing us  2.752 cents per hour to run these appliances.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turned the down lights off (fridge, phones and computers remain the same): 0.590 cents per hour to run.  This means the down lights in the office by themselves cost us 2.162 cents per hour to run.

  

With the downlights on again, we can change the mode on the wireless monitor and see that .235 Kwh of energy is used per hour to run the downlights (with fridge, phone and hibernated computers running).