Hi Folks,
This is by way of a followup to Reducing energy usage. The forum software helpfully bought up that thread when I started typing this one. As an update to that thread, we’ve moved most of our lighting to LED now. It wasn’t expensive. However, I haven’t set up any timers yet.
In any case, our electricity bill for the past month is again way up, after being reasonable for much of the past six months. The month before that was up too.
I was thinking of installing an electric power meter to monitor power usage in real time in the guest room. I suspect some guests leave the A/C running and leave for the day. But if they do so, then the electrical output for the room would be high. And if they turn everything off as they should, power consumption should be close to zero. This is corroborated partly by noticing that guests not infrequently leave the A/C running on checkout. And people are (I assume) more careful to turn stuff off on checkout then if they are just leaving the room during their stay. And they are constantly leaving exterior lights on, sometimes all night. E.g. there’s a corridor outside the room - it’s common for that corridor light to be left on, even in the daytime.
Note: most of my guests are tourists, and frequently couples. They usually here for a few days (three is common) and are often out most of the day.
A question - I realise that this isn’t an electrical engineering forum, but if the A/C compressor is off and just the fan is running (which happens with all A/Cs that are not inverters) will the power usage still be high? Or does it fluctuate a lot, depending on whether the compressor is running?
Anyway, I figure I can monitor the meter, and if the dial shows high usage and the guests are not at home, I can go into the guest room and turn stuff off. I can tell if they are out, because the guest room door uses a padlock on the outside.
Another question: is this something I should tell the guests about, or just do it? I.e. should I tell them that I’m monitoring the electrical usage in the room, and may go in to turn stuff off if they are not at home? (As I write it, it does sound like an absurd thing to say.)
Here are some possible examples of energy meters I found on Amazon India.