So, still in the throws of moving house, I did my bit for the environment and installed my shiny new energy reading device (before I had unpacked my clothes, books or even a saucepan). It may have helped that I was watching Earth: The Climate Wars; last night's fascinating documentary on how science has viewed climate change in recent history. Or it could have simply been my innate, eco-warrior status, which may, of course, be about to be blown completely out of the water.
Follow the jump to find out how I got on and check out my twitter feed for real-time updates!
Now, I should point out that I am not the best when it comes to gadgets, especially at the setup stage. I'm not ashamed to admit that I have become well accustomed to having a 'tech guy' somewhere in the near vicinity to talk me through the blue screen stages of any technological operation before the idiot-proof stage kicks in. But despite my fears, setting up the Wattson was a doddle. The hardest part was locating the electricity meter itself...
Once I'd idenfited the mysterious box with numbers on it, it was simply a case of attaching a large clip to one of the wires, which then tell all their secrets to a sensor. This sensor then sends all that information to the seperate Wattson unit, which sits almost anywhere else in the house and receives the signal. The way it works with that signal is where the Wattson differs from all other energy meters in terms of coolness, as not only does it turn the data into numbers, it creates pretty colours too, so it doubles up as a rather interesting mood-lamp.
As soon as the clip was connected to the wire, the Wattson turned an ominous shade of red, while the display read "670 watts". Even without having read all the instructions I knew that this was Not Good, and immediately attributed this to my other half, who was playing GTA 4 on the Xbox at the time. But surprisingly, the extinguishing of a few household lights (all with energy saver lightbulbs) soon reduced the overall usage enough to turn the bright red light to a calmer purple. When the gaming had come to an end, the figures shot down to below 300 watts, and the light turned a saintly blue.
I've not collected the data for a full 24 hours yet, but I'm assured this process will also be painless, with a simply USB cable that plugs into the Wattson unit. But so far I'm very impressed -- for emotinally driven, visual people like me the colour-code system is the perfect way to induce guilt, a small amount of panic ('OMFG it's turned red') and just the right level of motivation to cut down on using the leccy. Minutes after turnign it on i could feel my behavious changing.
So let's see how we get on for the rest of the week. Will I be conviscating the Xbox? Or will I find my own ways to get that evil red light glowing again?
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