Low Impact

I’ve written in the past about my Centameter - a great little device that tells me how much power the household is using at any moment. But its strength is also its weakness: while I can tell at a glance how the house is doing, its hard to tell exactly how much power a specific appliance is using.

The imaginatively-titled MS6115 power meter (pictured) solves this problem. You plug it into the wall, then plug the appliance you want to measure into it. The power meter then monitors the power running through and displays it on the inbuilt LCD screen.

This is fantastic for seeing the power consumption of smaller devices that just don’t show up on the granularity of the Centameter. The Centameter only measures to an accuracy of 10 watts, and my experience is that as the household consumption comes down, the less accurate it becomes. But the MS6115 measures down to individual watts.

Even better, the MS6115 is great for measuring the power consumption of an appliance that changes over time - something like a washing machine that goes through spin and rinse cycles for instance. The MS6115 can measure your appliance while it performs some task and you can see the total power used during that operation.

Its already turned up some surprises. Being an environmentally conscious person , I always turn our TV off on the mechanical switch at the front of the unit, rather than the remote. And I’ve been feeling good at hearing the mechanical “clunk” of the switch and seeing that red standby light go off - no phantom power wastage for me!

Sure enough, when I decided to measure the TV’s consumption when the unit was off, but the standby light was on, the TV was drawing 7 watts of power. Over a year, thats 61 KwH, or 61 kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted. (That works out to be around $6 a year in electricity bills too). Then I turned it off with its front switch and watched the power consumption drop to….. 7 watts.

Yep.

Turns out that turning the TV off at with the front switch gets the little red light to go out, and stops it responding to the remote. But it still drains 7 watts of power every minute of every day! The only way to really turn this TV off is at the wall!

I haven’t been around the rest of the house yet to see what other surprises I find. But clearly the MS6115 (however badly named!) is a great device for hunting out energy hungry appliances.

It’ll cost you around $30 - $40 (in Australia). I got mine from a mob called todae via mail order, but I’ve also seen it advertised at Jaycar. The instructions are minimal, but luckily it doesn’t seem to require much know-how beyond plugging it into the wall, so most people shouldn’t have too much trouble driving it. Highly recommended if you’re interested in cutting down on your household power bill!

Categories: efficiency, energy, environment, green, reduce

Tags: appliance, consumption, efficiency, ms6115, reduce