I have 4 properties for which I am responsible for the gas and electricity costs which are circa £5k per year. I have 11 flood lights, 4 gas boilers,
2 always on PCs, 4 routers, 4 washing machines, and a good selection of CFLs scattered over the properties.I would welcome any recommendations to reduce my energy bills!
Steve
What are the 11 floodlights for?
=A31250 per annum per property doesn't seem too bad to be honest.
I'd recommend buying or borrowing one of those OWL energy monitoring gadgets - they are quite revealing.
Steve
On Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:04:33 +0100 someone who may be "Mr Sandman" wrote this:-
What type, on for how long, doing what?
There is plenty of advice on the Interweb thingy. Do some basic research first and then people may be more inclined to help you fine tune things.
The only thing I will say is that stopping energy loss is the first thing to do.
Not if its a one bedroom flat :)
If the properties are rented and the tenants are not directly paying for the energy what incentive have they got for switching off lights and appliances when not required?
Flood lights are probably a waste. What are they lighting, and for how long?
Seems incredibly good to me. (I spend much more than that on one property.) The OP should be awarded a green prize.
But they sound rather strange properties. No TV? No microwaves or ovens? No immersion heaters? A prison? Kennels?
In message , Mr Sandman writes
You could always stand back and think about it
e.g. what are the floodlights for ?
or better still, sell up and go and live in a cave
On floodlights, if you have the usual 500W halogen lights, consider going fitting lower wattage bulbs (you can get them down to 200W in the same size bulb) or changing to high pressure sodium fittings.
You have to buy new fittings but they last a long time and the much reduced power consumption compared to halogen floodlights means that the payback period cannot be long.
I have also seen adverts for EcoFlood lights such as these, but don't know anything about them:
On washing machines, wash at the lowest temperature that gives acceptable results. There are quite a few detergents that seem to work well at 30C.
Why? Flood lighting just to make the building(s) "look nice" at night is a pure waste of energy. So called 500W "security" lights are anything but, they just screw up you night vision and create black shadows that you can't see into thus excellent hiding places.
Do both have to be on 24/7? I've just taken to switching my workstation off overnight (moving a 24/7 monitoring task it was preforming to the server). There has been a 2 unit/day drop in the power consumption, the workstation is a 1GHz Athlon, the monitor was always turned off overnight.
Habit i suppose when ive need light outside, Ive just fitted floods, generaly 500watt bulbs too, am considering replacing them with these..
I need both PCs accessable remotly, i use logmein, and it wont work if the remote PC is not on.
I have a couple of company's quoting to increase loft insulation, and one of the properties needs wall cavity insulation, so will get that done.
Steve
Do they need to be continuously reachable or could they be run up on a time switch?
If you don't need much performance or the application is somewhat embedded, there are lower power PC platforms around.
Of these, the most difference is likely to be from insulating the walls. In most properties the heatloss through the walls exceeds that through the roof and increasing insulation in the roof space if there already is some, is second order compared with addding to walls if there was none before.
Forward a different port from your router to each PC, configure the PCs for WAKE-on-LAN and then wake them up remotely when you need them ...
If they are simply task lights, used maybe an hour a week when you do stuff, the payback time will be nearly forever. (55p/week) If they are PIR lights that go off when you go past them, and are set to
30s, going off 4-5 times a day, again the payback will be nearly forever. (3p/week)OTOH - if they are on all night - 30 quid a week. For 'not trip over stuff on paths' - something like
Someone will surely correct me if I am wrong, but couldn't you use a
150W halogen lamp instead of a 500W? Avoid changing the fitting but achieve much of the savings.Only 1-75 each if you buy 10+.
(We have a 150W lamp and, for our modest requirements, it is perfect. Stays on for, IIRC, about 3 minutes when triggered.)
as already said replace 500w with 150w
check thermostat setting, fit insulation behind rads, fit cavity wall insulation, draught excluding,
depends what theyre used for, but replacement with an old low cost laptop could wipe out most of that energy use. Not worth buying a new one though. Another poss is to underclock the machines as much as poss
- but it all depends what youre doing with them.
peanuts
essential - encourage use of full loads rather than part loads though
hardly worth trying to cut energy use further on those
What do you think you could do?
NT
Assuming that they do only trigger 4 or 5 times/day. Most of the time you don't know if passing wild life or traffic sets 'em off. I'd say that 30s would be annoyingly short if out there, wander out of range or stand still and the light goes out... then blinds you when you trigger it again.
We have a no eyelid version above our front door ample light for moving about and doesn't create deep shadow.
Wake on LAN has already been mentioned. Together with a suspend/sleep after a pre determined time of inactivity, though you might be able to shutdown remotely as well.
Or manually shut down when finished? Assuming Windows (IIRC GUI not available remotely):
C:\Documents and Settings\Leonora>shutdown /? Usage: shutdown [-i | -l | -s | -r | -a] [-f] [-m \\computername] [-t xx] [-c "c omment"] [-d up:xx:yy]
No args Display this message (same as -?) -i Display GUI interface, must be the first option -l Log off (cannot be used with -m option) -s Shutdown the computer -r Shutdown and restart the computer -a Abort a system shutdown -m \\computername Remote computer to shutdown/restart/abort -t xx Set timeout for shutdown to xx seconds -c "comment" Shutdown comment (maximum of 127 characters) -f Forces running applications to close without warning -d [u][p]:xx:yy The reason code for the shutdown u is the user code p is a planned shutdown code xx is the major reason code (positive integer less than 256) yy is the minor reason code (positive integer less than 65536)
In message , Mr Sandman writes
VPN to router then use wake on LAN.
>
hour of inactivity, will Wakeonlan bring a PC out of hibernation, or only sleep mode? Also, which MAC do I need, the network card on the mother board or the MAC of the ADSL router? in the case of one of the PCs, it sits behind a cable modem and a 4 way router...which MAC do I use in this case? and which IP address do I use?
thanks for this!
Steve
makes sence, will order a pile and replace all the bulbs, then check sensitivity is not to strong...I think the wind turns them on quite often.
Steve
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