Watching your electric consumption.

How much electricity do you use in a day? Not sure?
Take your electric bill and look at the kilowatt hour (kwh) usage for the month.
Then take that total amount of kwh used and divide that by the number of days for that billing period. This will give you the average daily kwh used.

Is that easy enough for you? It is, but how do I know exactly what I used for a particular day?
That would be a tough one. Unless you sit and watch your electric meter.

I recently found a device out there that can give you that information.
T.E.D. Electricity Monitor will show you the electricity used and how much that will cost.
And get this, it will update it every second. Can you imagine watching what you are spending on electricity by the second? Then you can also get the optional software interface and look at this information on your computer. You can manipulate the data to show graphically what you use and spend daily, weekly, and monthly.

The company claims that you can watch your electric usage go up and down depending on what is being used or not being used at that moment. The base unit costs $140.00. The software interface costs an additional $45. So for a total of around $200 you can monitor your full electrical usage by the second.

Because you can see what you are spending in "real time" you may be more apt to shut things down saving you in electric costs. This savings would be the pay back for the unit.
I would say that makes this a useful item to have. I will have to invest in one with money from our tax return.

Another option to see how much you are spending on electricity is a Kill-A-Watt Electricity Load Meter and Monitor. This unit only costs about $20- 25 depending where you get it. The Kill-A-Watt will allow you to find out which of your appliances, lamps and computers are actually costing you the most! Just plug them into the Kill-A-Watt electricity usage monitor and it will tell you how efficient they are. The Kill-A-Watt’s easily-readable LCD display measures consumption by the kilowatt-hour, just like the electric company.

Would you save money with one of these units? You probably would knowing how much you are spending on electricity for a particular appliance that has lost it's energy efficiency. I myself would find it challenging to see if I could lower usage knowing what sources use more electricity and which sources would reduce energy consumption.

The bottom line is reducing our overall energy consumption. If tools such as these can help I am all for it.