Energy and electricity monitors are now a common appliance in many people’s homes. They can provide valuable information about energy consumption, cost and wastage that can be used to drastically reduce bills, saving both money and energy which can benefit both ourselves and the environment.

There are a wide range of energy monitors on the market and they range from the sophisticated to the simple, some designed for home use, others able to monitor entire offices and large buildings – providing realtime information and remote accessing.

In choosing an electricity monitor you need to first ascertain what you require it for and what you hope to achieve with it. For around the home, there are a myriad of different designs and types of monitor that can provide varying amounts of information.

Simple Smart Meters

The simplest of all energy monitors are the wattage meters that can be fitted to individual plug sockets. These provide just basic information about power consumed, but can convert the information into money to make calculating usage easier. They can be transferred from socket to socket allowing you to establish how much power each device is consuming.

Basic Energy Monitors

Another simple method of monitoring energy use but in a more omniscient way, are these devices, many of which can work wirelessly preventing the need to keep squatting at the main household meter.

These devices monitor the entire household’s energy consumption and nearly all these energy monitors provide basic information of usage, cost and many allow you to upload data to a PC to enable you to view it in spreadsheet programs – so you can study your household’s use over a selected time-frame.

Sophisticated energy monitoring systems.

More sophisticated energy monitors are available that while more expensive than the simpler versions...