We had a chat with Chris Hunt, an energy coach for HEA. He explains how he is an energy coach for Californian residents for free.

In part 2 of this series, Chris dives into common power hogs that often surprise people. He advises and helps with simple, cheap fixes to these power hogs to cut electricity and gas bills substantially. These savings persists without further changes and often barely change a person’s lifestyle. He gives lightbulbs and various water pumps as a prime examples of unnoticed electricity hogs. Chris guides the user through how to replace lightbulbs.

Chris also talks about what he goes through to find these power hogs to save big on electric bills. He goes into detail how he uses smart meters, analysis software and electricity monitors.

You can also read part 1 of the series.

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CHRIS:  Here’s a good example. I’ll walk into somebody’s garage and they’re fairly proud of the fact that they actually have banks of fluorescent lights over their cars. And because it’s a fluorescent light, they assume it’s energy efficient. Well those bulbs–those long bulbs–those four foot bulbs are often 40 watts and there’s two to a side of a bank and there may be four bulbs in that bank and four banks in the garage. All of a sudden you’re finding out you’re using 800 watts in the garage and you thought you were being very energy efficient. So people tend to leave those on because they’re coming in and out of the garage all the time. So it’s a simple math question, when you flip off and measure, you say, “You know what, these are actually fairly expensive light bulbs to leave on a long time.”

CHRIS:  Now you can get LED versions of those bulbs, or you can simply become aware that you shouldn’t leave the lights on in your garage for hours because it will hurt you. The same thing is true with other lights and I found that to be one of the most common things. People have various sized houses, a number of people living in the houses as well, but something as simple as changing out your incandescent bulbs can make a big difference. And here’s a good example of this. I have a lot of clients who are in the high end of usage. And they assumed that the light bulbs can’t have an effect because there’s so many other things that they have. They have home automation systems, they have electric vehicles, et cetera. But a lot of these homes have these built-in tall ceilings, vaulted ceilings, and all the lights are embedded in those ceilings.

CHRIS:  You might walk into a room and find 12 or 15 or more of these overhead floods or spots in the ceiling. And that button that they press on the wall not only turns on the lights that’s in that ceiling, in that room, but it may turn on the lights in the room next to it which could be the kitchen. And there’s often a lot of outside lights on at night as well. So when I show them that by simply turning on that light, there are usually 2000 or 3000 watts possibly because these bulbs that are in the ceiling, they are 60 to 65 watts, and there’s 10 of them. 650 watts in that one room. You keep on doubling up like that. The same thing with the outside lights, it says low voltage, so people think it means low wattage. That’s not true. The low voltage refers to the transformer, essentially.

CHRIS:  Those bulbs in those up-lights outside in your garden, in your backyard, they can be 35 or 50 watts and you’ve got dozens of them. So it’s very simple to go into somebody’s house and say, “I know you think you’ve made substantial changes already, but I can prove to you that there’s other changes we can make that are very simple, that will make a big difference in your bill.” So what I encourage people to do then, is go to a big box store, bringing one of the old bulbs with them, so they get the same form factor and the same base when they are trying to swap something out. Just buy one. Make sure it says dimmable if you want it dimmable.  Also, make sure it has the right Kelvin factor, if you want it to be warm white or warm yellow or bright light. And I’ll explain that in a second, but you make sure you get a bulb that is the same size, the same color you want, it’s dimmable and the equivalency.

CHRIS:  So the equivalency means that if you have a 65 watt bulb or 50 watt bulb in your ceiling, you wanna get an LED volume that also says 50 watt equivalent on the package. Now it actually may use only seven, eight, nine watts, but it puts out the equivalent of 50 watts from an incandescent bulb. So that’s just a good example of how somebody can take a onetime hit by replacing all the bulbs in their ceilings, in their lamps, and make a huge difference on their bill. There’s more than just lighting, I just had a client a couple of days ago who, I went to their house, and they couldn’t figure out what was going on. Their background usage was always about 1500 Watts and they couldn’t figure it. It was like, “We’ve turned everything off, what is going on?” Turns out, they had a bathroom floor with an electric floor mat that was underneath that they thought it was off. It turns out that the floor mat would come on in the midnight hours essentially.

CHRIS:  So that it didn’t have to jump so far in the morning, to get up to the temperature that they wanted. So it turns out was running all the time, 24/7, seven days a week at 500 watts, and that was just adding to their bill and bumping them into the next tier for their electric bill, as well. What I find when I go to these houses is stuff that people don’t realize is actually eating up money. Recirc pumps is another good example of that. But I should let you ask your next question because I started to go off on a tear here.

TRAVIS:  No, no this is great. So I guess you kind of, you mentioned lighting, is one of the big places where people can save?

CHRIS:  It is a big place they can save, but it’s a simple one. People often don’t believe it. So when I walk into these houses, and oddly enough, a lot of these houses, like I say, are high end, they can’t believe that it makes a big difference. But it can, if you look at your lighting at night, you might have on the lights for five or six hours and you’ve gotten them on in the kitchen, you’ve gotten them on in the room next to the kitchen, you’ve got them on outside as well. And if all of a sudden you take that down from 2000 to 300 watts because you replace them all with LED bulbs, that means there’s only 300 watts an hour as opposed to the 2000 for hour after hour, day after day after day. So it really can have an impact. But that’s not where you stop. That’s simply the first place that you can look when you walk into a house.

CHRIS:  Matter of fact, I don’t even start with the inside of the house. When I get to someplace, I walk around the outside. I look at the meter to see what it says. And a lot of people don’t realize this, but the smart meter itself on the outside of your house is a very useful tool. If you look at the smart meter, it will show a series of numbers that will rotate through.

TRAVIS:  Wait, Chris, when say “smart meter,” what are you talking about?

CHRIS:  Oh, okay. Okay. So in California, certainly, and a lot of other municipalities and other states as well, have replaced the old meters that had a wheel, that would actually spin. And that wheel, as it would spin, would indicate how much energy was being used. The smart meter is essentially attached directly to your service panel, so that when energy is being used, it reflects it with a number, right on the glass or inside the glass meter on the outside of the house.

CHRIS:  Most people know that if you have a meter on the outside of your house on the side, or possibly inside the garage. And it will show you a number, it’ll show you a large number at first and that’s the total number of kilowatt hours since that meter was installed. You can ignore this first large number. The next number that comes up may say something like 244 or 241, and that’s actually the voltage of the meter that is showing you. The third number that comes up is actually the amount of energy that is being used, right at that moment. If you see 1,500 on your smart meter while you’re looking at it, it means that you are using 1,500 watts or 1.5 kilowatts. If I come to a house, and the first thing in the morning, nine o’clock, I’m going to do an audit and I see 1.5 kilowatt showing on the meter, I think, “Huh, something is going on.”

CHRIS:  And they say, nothing else is going on. But clearly something is. So that gives you a clue that there is something that’s running in your house, whether you’re aware of it or not. 1500 watts is a good example, it would be like a microwave. And it’s probably not a microwave at that particular moment, but it could be two or three refrigerators plus an audio system plus somebody doing something with … oh, like an insta hot tap, which is 700 watts as well. So what I do is I look for the smart meter, but I do the whole circuit of the house. If they have a pool, I look to see if there’s a pool pump, If they have a fountain, I look to see if there’s a pump for that as well. And same thing with the garage. Is there anything in there like an electric vehicle? Once I’ve done the outside of the house, then I walk in and I talk to the owner. And basically get a rundown on what equipment they have in the house and what they think is writing their bill up.

TRAVIS:  Oh, I see. As an energy coach, you use a smart meter and some other monitoring stuff and you help go around the house to figure out these things. Like whether it be lighting or a pool pump or I think you mentioned some other pump. And to help people figure out what is it that’s really eating up their electricity bill?

CHRIS:  Exactly.

TRAVIS:  Okay.

CHRIS:  I’ll bring with me, a small monitor that I will digitally connect to the smart meter. And it takes a few minutes to actually do that, but then this monitor, this little handheld device from a company called Rainforest will actually mimic the same amount of information that is on your smart meter. So instead of standing outside and asking somebody else to turn on the electric dryer or the electric oven or the microwave or what have you, you can basically just do it yourself. You can do it at the service panel or you can do it inside the house, and as you turn something on and off, you record the delta on a sheet of paper that I’ve designed for writing down all these facts essentially. A good example, like I mentioned earlier, was the microwave where if you want to test the monitor to see if it’s accurate, you just need to say, “Okay, it currently reads 1000 watts. That’s the amount of electricity the house is using it at this moment. Let’s turn on the microwave.”

CHRIS:  You can use the monitor for all the other electronic appliances in your house. You can turn lights on and off, you can turn on the electric dryer, you can see if they’ve got a recirc pump and a recirc pump is a good example, something that people don’t realize is using energy, both gas and electricity. A lot of homes, especially the big homes, the bathroom is so far away from the hot water heater that it’ll take three minutes before the hot water gets there. They actually have a contractor install a recirc, a recirculation pump, that is continually sending hot water through all the pipes.

CHRIS:  So you always have hot water ready. The catch is, the homeowner doesn’t realize that that pump uses about 80 watts an hour all by itself to send that hot water around. And it’s also heating the hot water as well. The, not the recirc pump, but the gas water heater is being used to heat the water. So you’re using both gas and electricity when you don’t need to. It’s very easy to basically get a little device that’ll turn on the recirc pump, just before you need it. But again, I’m getting off target here. I’m just simply saying that this little monitoring device and an energy coach walks into your house and starts analyzing all the electronic pieces and all the gas pieces as well, they say, “Where are you using energy and how much energy, and does that actually sync up with the data I have about your energy bill?”

Continue reading Part 3: Experience with an Energy Coach