The flip that can save you an easy 10$ every year!

I recently bough my self a thermal camera, mostly for experimental photography, but I lead me to discover a few energy saving tips in my house that I will share here.

First I was surprise to see how “hot” were running my digital thermostats. Simply by touching them, you can’t notice the energy waste but the thermal camera was sensitive enough to highlight it for me. What happens is even if the thermostat is not heating the house, it still convert some 220v AC to DC to have its circuit measuring the temperature. That produces a little bit of heat. During winter days, this heat is useful, however in the summer days it’s a waste of energy.

After some research online, I found out it was about 4w per thermostat. As I have 8 of them in my house and I only need to heat half of the year, that mean it cost me 10$ per year to have them powered during the hot days. (0.004kw/h*24h/day*180days*0.07$/kw*8units=10$). So a simple flip of the heating CB during summer will save me 10$ in energy and will help somehow to keep my house colder!

A few other things I noticed were the oven clock and a mechanical timer. Unfortunately I can’t get rid of the oven clock, but I will be careful with the mechanical timer. It is taking 4w as well and if used on LED Christmas lights it is possible it takes about the same power as the light them self! And that is 24h/day even when the lights are off!