What devices to monitor using energy plugs?

Fridges, freezers and anything else with compressors - dehumidifiers, aircon - can have failure modes where they keep working mostly normally but using vastly more power than expected due to the compressor never going off.

That's the only thing I'd really feel the need to monitor; and even then I don't. Smart meter interval data gives me some idea of the worst use devices and I can figure out most stuff from its specs as mentioned above.

High A rated anything usually means the old system; which is F/Gs on the current rating for most things - don't think dryers have changed over yet. There aren't A (or B-D) rated dishwashers or fridges on the new scale, for instance. So there might be a significantly lower consuming device available for those still.

Hi all.. I’m at my wits end with electricity bills, have a smart meter with accurate readings. My problem is the Smart Meter reports under headings like Lighting, refrigeration, entertainment etc. this is all fine. There is another heading called ‘other’ which is simply vague. My usage under this heading has gone from €21 to €148 in a few months. My units have gone from 440 to 900 in 6 months, and have no idea what’s causing it! I’ve turned off everything in the house and it’s still 0.9kWh per hour, which equates to €240 / month before I turn on a light!! Any advice on what unknown appliance might be screwing me? Any advice much appreciated!

I bought one of the fairly basic plug in things to figure out what was driving my bills, they weren't astronomical but a bit higher than they should be. I checked everything in the house over the course of time.

Now obviously the info about the fridge/washing machine/dryer etc is just information as in I still have to use them obviously. I had two freezers though, one upright and another small chest freezer that was quite old, turned out that yoke was using a hell of a lot of electricity in comparison to the upright which is way bigger. Upshot anyway is I used up some frozen food and put the freezer on marketplace and sold it. It was the age of the freezer was the problem and I might again buy a spare one but at least it will be more efficient.

The only thing in the house I couldn't measure easily other than turning off everything else so that it was the only thing running was a radon fan, I can't remember exactly but it's adding 12/15 euro to each bill. Any septic tank or well pumps that are running continuously that shouldn't be or faulty in some way?

Thanks for the advice folks. The annoying thing about the new smart meters is when you turn off a breaker for an hour for example, you’ve to wait 2 days for the info to update on the app, it’s not real time. And the reading is in full units, not even broken into tenths so very difficult to monitor. I miss the old spinning dial on the old meter where you could physically see it speed up and slow down as you checked.

Just on this topic, let me tell you about what I used a power monitoring plug (and Home Assistant) for last week:

I had and old side-by-side fridge-freezer which was working ok for 22 years. It has been pulling 1.9kWh per day for the last 3 years at least (694kWh per year). Anyway last Wednesday I noticed that the milk was warm and when I checked the freezer I noticed that it wasn't cooling at all. I pulled the power for 1 min and when I plugged it back in the compressor came on and started to work again, so my food was safe for now, phew. About 4 hours later the same thing happened on Wednesday night. I pulled the power and it worked away again.

It was going to be Thursday night by the time I made it down to the shops to order a new unit, so I needed to ensure that the food remained frozen during that time. So I knew that pulling the power after the unit had shut-down recovered the compressor again for a few hours, so I setup an event on Home Assistant to monitor the electrical consumption of the freezer and watch for a period when the power in watts was less than 100w for more than 10 mins.

When that event was seen by Home Assistant it was to send me a notification on my phone and also power off the freezer for 1min and then power it back on again. Following that I made it to Saturday evening when the new unit was delivered and the fridge was automatically reset by Home Assistant around 5 times. The new unit has now been plugged in for 7 days and its efficiency is far better than the last - it's only pulling 0.8kWh per day, so around 292kWh per year.

So yeah, smart plugs on devices can be very handy for troubleshooting some issues!

Hmm - any bulbs pulling less than around 15w are definitely LED. You might find that blue LED's have a higher consumption than other colours, but 8.5w is a tiny amount to be concerned about.

It might be a case of "conditioning", if you want to call it that. In the past all lamps (LED, CFL incandescent) were rated A++ to F and all LED's were automatically rated A and CFL's were ~C and incandescent were then F. In that system LED consumed around 3.5w, CFL's 15w and the equivalent incandescent was around 75w, so there was a considerable difference between LED and incandescent.

Recently that rating system changed as incandescent was phased out, so it now goes A to G, but it only rates CFL and LED. So now your energy consumption scale is much shorter, from around 1w for high efficiency LED's to around 15w for some CFL's. So now even LED's can seen inefficient when they aren't in reality, just the scale has changed and the perception is different.

So 8.5w will only cost you one electrical unit in 117hrs while the equivalent incandescent set of bulbs at ~60w would have consumed that same electrical unit in 16 hours. 😀

The low hanging fruit is anything that generates heat.

So water heater, washing machine, dishwasher, storage heaters, tumble dryer etc etc.

If you have these under control then you're most of the way there.

After this you're looking at PCs and gaming consoles, and anything that's usually always turned on, or on standby.

After that, the cost of installing a monitor is probably more than the savings you'd ever make from it.

This Athom:

Now granted it's not the cleverest device to install onto a fridge-freezer (as a failure of the device will cause the loss of power to the fridge), but they are handy for what I need.

You can also get a Tasmota version too.

I would say they quite accurate, based on device component specifications and "set" conditions.

With time, your dishwasher heater element will/might limescale-up - this will have an effect on power consumption.

Your mains/tank water temperature will be different during seasons - this will have an effect on power consumption.

However, its not manufacturers "accuracy" problem its the conditions that cannot be predetermined

Absolutely agree with you... and this is another factor accounted, when they do provide consumption tables in their manuals

from one of bosch models...

and if anyone has time and interest, IEC 60456 standard here

https://www.iecee.org/certification/iec-standards/iec-604562010