I work from home and I’ve added a lot of kit over the past year - media centre, new printer, file server, wireless routers and so on. But my energy bill has risen from £25 a month to £140.  Ouch! 

I buy my electricity from Good Energy so it is all 100% renewable. They charge 2-3 pence extra per kWh compared to regular suppliers but, as I understand it, they are the only supplier in the UK that gets all of its energy from wind farms.

Even so, £140 a month hurts.  A lot.  It was time to get medieval on my electricity bill. Here’s how I cut my energy consumption by approximately 40%.

• Measure, measure, measure. You can’t reduce what you can’t measure.  So I bought an efergy Energy Saving Meter (Amazon link). It costs £45 but it’s the heart of my cost reduction strategy. You clip it onto the live cable that comes out of your electricity meter. Don’t worry, you don’t need an electrician and it is perfectly safe. It takes about 30 seconds to do it. It wirelessly transmits the energy going through the meter every six seconds to a handheld, portable display. You can get readouts measured in cumulative kWh, current consumption in kW, CO2 emissions and cost per hour. The great thing is that you can take the display anywhere in the house and see the effect of switching things off in real time.
• Eliminate the unnecessary. When I first switched on the unit, I was consuming about 1.3 kW.  It turns out that there were a lot of things in the house that were plugged in permanently that didn’t need to be. Toothbrush chargers, spare bedroom alarm clocks, an unused DAT drive on the server, a TV and Xbox that we rarely used etc. etc.  Going round the house and switching all this stuff off cut out about 0.2 kW.
• Better networking kit. I replaced two wireless routers with a Netgear WNR854T. This has better range than the old ones so that it could cover the whole house on its own. Plus, because it is Wireless-N compatible, it will work with the next generation of wireless kit at speeds up to 300 Mb/s. It has a 4-way gigabit switch in it so I was also able to ditch one of my old Netgear switches.  This replaced three devices that each had a power supply with just one.
• Bye Bye Standby. Next I wanted to tackled the dozen or so phone chargers, home cinema boxes, TVs and computer equipment that I needed most of the time but which had to be switched off when it wasn’t in use. This is where the Bye Bye Standby comes in. It costs £20-25 per kit. It’s a small remote control that lets you switch plugs on and off remotely. The starter kit comes with three plugs and one remote but I found that I needed two kits. If you plug a power supply strip into a plug, you can switch three or four devices off at once. I have one on my home cinema, on my power chargers, on the Sonos boxes in a couple of rooms, on my strip of phone and camera chargers etc. etc. At night, all I do is switch everything off.  This accounts for another 0.2-0.3 kW of consumption.
   
• PC Power Management. I set my PC and my wife’s to go into sleep mode after 30m and to switch off the display after 10 minutes. Hard to judge the total savings because we use our computers at different times. However, the computers consume 0.2-ish kW more when running than when sleeping, so I’m anticipating a good saving if only because they will go to sleep overnight automatically.
• Better behaviour. I’m trying not to overfill the kettle. I love tea (see Tools for writing: a nice cup of tea) and I hate limescale. So I boil the kettle with fresh water every time. Using a water filter means that I can fill the kettle with less water, avoid limescale build up and still get a clean cuppa.  The worst energy consumers though, are the oven, dishwasher and washing machine. They use 4 or 5 kW each when running. My eyes have opened to the value of the microwave and eco-friendly settings on the other devices.
• Longer term. I’ve got the “resting” power consumption of the house down to around 0.5 kW (from 1.3 kW on average before the campaign). Once I factor in the major appliances which only run a few times a week, I reckon this is about a 40% saving.  But I’m not done.  I’m planning to upgrade my wife’s PC and I’ll get her one of the ultra-low power consumption HP models. I’m looking for an Energy Star 4.0 compliant machine with an 80% efficient power supply.  When I upgrade my server later this year, I’ll want something much more energy efficient.  We have a few energy-efficient bulbs but as the other ones fail, I’m going to replace all the bulbs in the house with low-power ones.