WattHackers | Save Power | Go Solar | Live Green

Last year I put together a list of 10 Power Monitoring Devices to put Your House on a Diet and Save Power to share with everyone the great options that were available for monitoring and reducing home (or business) power use. At the time, I struggled to round the list out of ten, but now there is a whole new group of devices hitting the market. If you have endless hours to research, then maybe you have discovered some of these. If not, then maybe you’re like me and need to rely on great advice and tips from the energy conscious community. Russ, one of our readers, has been researching power saving technology for a home he’s building in Turkey. He was kind enough to pass along and let me share his list of whole house electricity monitoring devices as well as a few more plug meters. His list goes a little something like this:

Heavy hitter Google released news months ago that they were entertaining the notion of jumping into the power grid business. Well, the power management space to be more exact. This exciting news was followed by months of silence, but the rumors are starting to heat up based on Google and GE now hosting a “Plug into the Smart Grid” conference in Washington DC…

This short post gives several options to installing photocells to control dusk to dawn lighting. You can do this project with little money, tools, and experience.

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By now you’ve read a lot in recent news about solar panels, or “modules” as they are called within the industry.  You want to slap one down on your roof, ,and tap into some free power, right?  Getting a solar module to produce power is the easy part (more on that in an upcoming article).  [...]

When it comes to installing solar panels on your home or business, there are more choices now than ever before. Chances are good that a manufacturer is making a solar panel that will be perfect for your application; the challenge is figuring out which one to use, the proper size, voltage output, etc. There is no shortage of data out there, but real information is scattered about and confusing, so I built this guide based on the data I have collected for my own solar installation project. I hope you find the guide useful.

I must admit, I’m a big fan of unclutterer.com.  The shiny clean offices, organized cables under the desk, color coordinated boxes to hold every misguided purchase, and the endless stream of information that calls out that I’m a complete failure at getting my “stuff” in order.  I buy things to organized, and then I find [...]

Project: Add photocell (dawn to dusk switch) to existing outdoor fixture.
Difficulty: Easy
Time: 30 minutes
Benefits: Eco Friendly, power saver, time saver, esthetically appealing
Cost: $5 – 10 depending on you collection of tools.
Today’s Watthack covers adding a photo cell to a patio light.  This light is on our front porch and we typically turn it on when [...]

Solar Power With A new Twist
I rarely buy the local paper because their reporting is so biased and usually quite bad.  They like to use terms like “undocumented immigrant ” instead of “illegal” and “alleged terrorist” when speaking of Osama Bin Laden.  Something is alleged when we think we know who did it.  Since Osama [...]

I decided to put some numbers to what it would take to run our house on solar panels given our current energy demand. Currently our house is consuming an alarming 18,160 kilowatt hours (kWH) of power each year. Yes, we need to cut this a bunch, but let’s look at what it would take to power this house if we didn’t make any changes.

It’s official – I’m a watt weenie! Since starting this project, I’ve become conscious of our power usage in ways that I would not have thought possible. We don’t sit in the dark and huddle around a candle for warmth, but we have started turning more stuff off and unplugging power hungry electronics when we [...]