Quantifying Hydro Use

The benefits of a Kill A Watt meter

This is our last blog post from Southern Ontario. Saturday we begin our trek North. :)

This is a hectic time for the Northern Dirtbags. Packing up our apartment, making arrangements for the moving truck, making final purchases, arranging for deliveries and the list goes on. But keeping the end in mind has kept us going.

Throughout this time we have been making note of our hydro use. We were especially concerned with how much hydro would be used in charging our various technological items - phone, tablets, gps, walkie talkies etc. This concern stems from the ability of a Goal Zero system, we recently purchased, to charge them. We purchased the system to allow for some hydro availabilty during the build. (We do have a gas powered generator to power tools that are required for the build) We found that we can use one of the 6 panels from the final house solar system to charge the Goal Zero battery. That is welcome as it means we do not need to purchase a small wattage, high cost panel for just the build.

When we checked the wattage of different appliances used quite regularly we learned, that beyond our tablets and phone, some appliances can be used throughout the build and others will only be used once the build is complete and the sun is shining. In case you are not aware anything that either heats or cools requires a lot of hydro/energy. Our Goal Zero Yeti has specs that say it can handle 300W continuous with peaks up to 600W. It has a 400 Watt hour capacity. We used a Kill A Watt meter, which you plug into the wall and then plug the appliance into the meter, to measure each time we used a different appliance. We now have a list with the wattage of many of our appliances.

Now we know that we can continue to use the bread maker to make bread dough, for the whole wheat rolls we love, and bake them in the small propane oven while we build. Although mixing bread is not extremely difficult anything that can give us more build time will definitely be utilized. We learned that our computer has a 24W draw. Not a system like those used by PC gamers, which will have a power supply of 450W or greater, but it does all we need our computer to do. Our 32" flat screen TV has a 95W draw which means that we could watch a movie in the evening so long as the sun will be shining the next day to recharge the Yeti. But really we are going to be too exhausted to watch anything longer than 10 minutes before we will nod off. ;) 

Even if you are not off grid you can benefit greatly from the use of a Kill A Watt meter. Being aware of the draw of hydro used by an appliance will give additional knowledge when making future purchases. Keeping your hydro use minimized will keep that bill down as the rates continue to increase for those powered by the grid. And for those considering going off grid you will have a good idea on the size of the solar system you will need.

To be continued from Cochrane. :-D