Work recommences!

The purpose of this blog is to look at practical energy saving issues associated with everyday living. However, this is a large subject area, too much for one person to cover, and so some focus is needed. So at the top of the priority list is the need to identify areas that make significant financial savings with the minimum investment.

Needless to say some of the greatest outgoings are associated with the home. So that remains the focus of the blog and I have used my very typical home in the east midlands as a case study and recorded my findings in a web site www.conserveandsave.co.uk.

As the work progressed it became apparent that significant losses were being incurred through some surprisingly easy to fix sources. However, in general they were not obvious sources and were only discovered as a result of the detailed scrutiny resulting from the project. For most people these areas of energy inefficiency would go unnoticed. So how could this situation be remedied?

One way of doing this is measurement and controls and I drew comparison to my car which achieves significant efficiency gains over older models by virtue of the electronic engine management. Now a standard part of even the cheapest car, the ECU  measures multiple parameters thousands of times a second to provide just the right amount of fuel for any given situation. How different to a house! In comparison the majority of houses are primitive, often having only bi-metal strip room stats and no accurate means of measuring and controlling the energy flow.

Consequently, the focus of work has begun to look at measurement and control. Accurate readings were required for the work on the project house, in order to measure how efficiently the energy was being consumed. Unfortunately, this relied on readings that were impractical to obtain on a routine basis which led to interest in automating the process. This is why the following posts will be quite heavily devoted to this subject.