I do like gadgets and the emonpi system is an excellent gadget for keeping an eye on my panels.
The below graph is an interactive snippet that allows you to look at energy generation on the fly (Yellow is Solar) including how much I’m importing/exporting to the Grid (Green Line) and how much power I’m using in total (Blue).
Since all this talk about water consumption, it put me in mind of the amount of energy I use. I’m a high user – I don’t mind admitting that. I have a large house with four bedrooms and only two people in it. We have a lot of gadgets and one of the rooms is electrically heated.
The other motivating factor is the size of the bill that just dropped on the mat.
I’ve taken the statistics for the last year and I’ve created this graph. The red (electricity) shows a sharp spike in January. This may be due to not giving a proper reading in December/January. Of course we’ve had snow and the heater in the room has been on pretty much constantly. Gas shows pretty much what I’d expect. You can see that during June to October the majority of the usage is purely hot water (we don’t have gas cooking). The rest is heating.
We’ve moved onto a more green tariff, and the good news it’s giving us savings as well.
I'm Tim, a 31yr old ex-Allotmenteer. My wife and I used to have a small 5 rod plot in South Essex where we grew all manner of veg. I'm also involved in brewing the odd keg of beer.
When getting down the allotment got too hard and our circumstances changed we bought a house with a 65ftx30ft garden, which we're converting into a mini orchard and veg beds.
We get up to some weird and wonderful projects - we've built a small boat, a pig roaster (powered by a windscreen wiper), a chicken run, raised beds and try our hands at all sorts of stuff getting us closer to being 'self sufficientish'.
The hope is to introduce chickens soon and hopefully let them free range during the day.
If you want to contact me, you can do so here