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Mr Merry, being a thrifty kind of chap, seemed an ideal candidate for one of these for his birthday - given to him, appropriately, by STPD.

The OWL package consists of a simple sensor that clips around one of the wires to your electricity meter, a transmitter that sits by your electricity meter and the wireless LCD display that you can place wherever you think it'll be most useful. Installation is simple.

Effortless energy saving begins the moment you install the OWL. To begin with, you'll notice that often the reading is higher than normal and you'll have to get up and find out what you left on. Soon this becomes 2nd nature. It's claimed that a saving of upto 25% off your electricity bill is possible.

When most people first use the OWL, they are surprised how much electricity their home uses when they think it should be using virtually nothing. The thing to do is to note down the reading then go and find something to turn off, write down what the item was and the new OWL reading and keep going until the OWL reads zero. You'll then have a nice list of items to think about. ...

(read on!)  


So far we've found by far the worst culprit is the electric kettle, which bumps up our estimated costs to 40p an hour.  My beloved dishwasher's pretty bad too  :cry and on for longer than the kettle.  

It's all very interesting and certainly the sight of Mr Merry prowling suspiciously through the house with the OWL gripped in his hand keeps us all on our toes.
I have heard about those and wasn't there a plan/wish to install them by force on all our meters.

I just use the old fashioned method of reading the meter and checking it an hour later.

You are right about electric kettles being chief culprit , I tried using a gas kettle but then I would forget it and leave it on so I thought that overall the electric one was better.

Electric immersion heater was even worse but I have a gas water heater now.

Can you get the list of culprits from Mr Merry and post them here , then we can save 40 pounds.
:lol not sure we can save you £40 Furbs but Mr Merry has noted the following:

Unsurprisingly, anything that creates heat is highly costly:  kettle, dishwasher, washing machine (all add about 30p per hour while in the water-heating part of the cycle.)

3 or 4 PCs on adds about 3p an hour, so 1pc =1p/hour
Therefore:

A common year is 365 days = 8,760 hours - therefore

one pc left on all year 24/7 = £87

That's obviously a very rough estimate but it makes you think that it's well worth while turning them off when not going to be in use for a few hours, which I'm very lazy about as I like to leave my pcs on.

Kitchen lights:  we have halogen downlighters in groups of 4 or 5 and when they're all on the OWL shoots up by about 8p an hour.  Fine if you only have them on for scarfing down your beans on toast, but god knows what my neighbours' bill is since they seem to leave theirs on 24/7, but then they are very Rich and no doubt couldn't care less.

Will add any further notes as they come in hot off the OWL.

btw I thought a useful sideeffect would be that Mr M would be hot onto any appliances left on and forgotten, but the other day I left my electric chip pan on all aftrnoon :blush and apparently the OWL barely registered the excess - but that's probably because it has a thermostat and was only having a quick top-up burst every so often, when Mr M was in the loo or something.

Oh and  :mad  when our electricity came back on after the powercut the other day, the OWL zoomed up from 0.0 to 16.8 in a second, and then back down to 3 again - thus I actually sat here and watched the surge that killed poor Doomed  :cry
Thank you Merry the reporter.
I meant save me 40 pounds in that you can use the owl and see what uses what and tell me and then I can save 40 pounds on the cost of buying an owl.

I am opening my mum's post while she is away and she has a letter offering her a free owl type thing  if she signs up to something or other. They probably want her tied into something before she realises she can get the poor people's tariff.  I haven't been offered one yet .

There is background radiation as everything is off and unplugged at my mum's apart from the fridge. I have double checked to make sure she put everything off and I never even put the lights on.  And the gas has used 1.05 in a week and the electric 1.50 a week. So it is using a pound a week for nothing on the gas.

I have a setting on my Pc that turns it off after an hour, if you don't need them on to run useful things like backups you could try that.
A bit odd that the gas is that much. Is there a pilot light on somewhere? If so you probably can't turn it off safely anyway.
A pilot light will burn 800 to 1500 BTUs/hr. Your monthly gas bill should include your exact cost per "therm" (100,000 BTUs). Based on this rate you can calculate the cost for your area to operate a pilot light.


Have not had gas in such a long time I don't know how the meter displays usage.

I also found someone saying that their pilot light uses 1 cubic ft in 12 days.
Older meters like mine display in Cubic Feet.

More Modern ones like my Mum's (as they made her have a new one as our old one put 50ps in) display in Cubic Meters. Since then she has had to have a new one again as when the batteries run out the display stops and they can't get new batteries or something so are back to dials like mine.  

They have also given her a letter telling her it is her responsibilty to get the gas meter hooked up to the electric mains but in terraced housing gas comes in the front and electric in the back so it would be a massive job and she has ignored it, but I digress.

Then when you get the gas bill you get the sums to work out the cost and it is times by 2.83 if you are still on cubic feet , times by 1.0226400 volume conversion factor, times by 39.2652 calorific value divide by 3.6 kilowatt hour conversion factor. Then you can match up against their prices of 7.203 per kwhour.
Very difficult to work out the bill as the conversion factors seem to change each time. Their prices are not so much per meter unit like with electricity.

Anyway she has 2 pilot lights now , one for the water like me and one for the central heating. If the one for the water goes out , we need to get an engineer to fix it and it cost me 140.00 last year so it is not really cost effective. My mum says in the old days we could light the one in our old house with a match but no such happy days nowadays.

Anyway back to electricity now that the Merry house have identified Kettle as Evil. I have done a weekly check and next week will boil water on gas and cook toast on gas grill and see if it changes my gas and electric readings.

I can't check the week after as I am on holiday and will use loads having PC and music on all day long .  :)
Well I did some working out and it seems that a couple of pilot lights easily explains the gas use so it's not (as I feared) that there is a leak. It makes the case for electric ignition systems though as that is wasteful.

Those conversion calculations are terrible. I remember now trying to work them out ages ago when I still had gas. Since one or more of those numbers is a variable you are in effect paying a different price every time.
My central heating boiler has a spark ignition system which means it uses no gas at all when not actually heating up water. It's a few years old now and isn't as energy efficient as a more modern one but I worked out the payback time for replacing it once and it was around 20 years. Maybe that'd be a bit less now gas is more expensive.

The conversion factor varies because we use natural gas. Depending on the mix from the various gas fields at any particular time the heat produced from a given quantity of gas can change. So you don't pay for the gas you use, but the amount of heat that it produces when you burn it.
I will bear in mind that I need spark ignition if and when I have to get a new water heater ( if they have not already been discontinued )  . What does it spark from?

Do we actually have a choice on the gas heat we use. If I put the fire on full for 3 hours it is on full for 3 hours. It will use the same gas even if the gas is hotter won't it?

My mum's does seem dear. Gas=1.05 , Electric = 1.50
Mine is Gas = 1.19 , Electric 6.75
I have been here having gas water heated showers and gas heating baked beans and gas heating washing up water and it has only cost me 14p more.
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