Practically off the grid!

In your transition towards off the grid living you will definitely be concerned with your electrical power consumption at some point.  When it comes time for you to cut back your demand for electrical power it will be helpful to isolate each appliance you have to measure its power consumption.  A plug in electronic energy meter is a simple piece of technology that can make this task very easy.

Blue Planet Electronic Energy Meter

I found this Blue Planet Electronic Energy Meter for $25 at Canadian Tire.  It has a three prong plug on the back that you plug into a standard electrical outlet in your house.  Then you plug in any appliance and begin measuring the power consumed by that appliance.  Many appliances will have a power rating sticker of some kind but those ratings could change with the age of the appliance (especially refrigerators) so it is always best to just measure the power consumption yourself.  This device is also useful to measure phantom loads appliances draw even when they are turned off.  Simply plug any appliance into the meter, walk away and let the meter take the stats for you.  When you return hours or days later you can flip through the accumulated totals and see if that particular appliance is to blame for your high energy demands.

In order to give some examples of the data this meter provides, I have plugged my laptop into the meter for a few hours.  Here are some photos of the display screens:

As you can see the displays include readings for the outlet voltage, instantaneous power use, maximum power use, instantaneous current, maximum current, price of electricity per kWh, accumulated cost for power use and time of use.  That is plenty of information to assess the power demand of any appliance.  The time reading at the bottom shows that my laptop was plugged in to the meter for just over two hours.  In that time 0.01kWh of electricity was used for a total cost of $0.001.  You can see on display screen 2 that I have entered my local electricity cost of 11.24 cents/kWh.  The demand of the laptop varies drawing around 0.16 A or 7W.  These are instantaneous measurements so if the appliance you are measuring draws an irregular amount of power and you want to determine an average power consumption you need to divide the total number of kWh used by the time of power use.  

The increments of measurements are fairly large so this electronic energy meter is better suited to measure larger appliances.  Because my laptop only draws around 7W it took 2 hours of laptop use to accumulate any significant totals on the meter.  These totals will accumulate much more quickly when you use the meter to measure the power consumption of hot plates, microwaves, blenders and other more demanding appliances that use 100W to 2000W.  

I have found the meter to be a functional and convenient tool to satisfy my curiosity about the power demands of any appliance.  In fact, this is the meter I used to compare the power consumption of my old and high efficiency refrigerator.  It was that initial power reading of my old refrigerator that motivated the entire high efficiency refrigerator project.  I knew the old refrigerator was old, loud and probably inefficient but when the meter showed me that it consumed between 5 and 6 kWh a day I knew a change was necessary.  Pick up one of these meters and start plugging it in behind all of your old appliances.  Whether you are preparing for high efficient off grid living or just satisfying your curiosity you may be in for a surprise and a change of lifestyle.