PowerSwitch

Can your Efergy unit run on mains too? Is it better than the others on the market or did you just go for it because it was on sale at Maplins - as good a reason as any! :) It runs on batteries, both in the main unit and wireless transmitter. I think the Efergy and Owl are almost identical. The Watt...

...The household monitor would help in habit changing rather than in capturing accurate data. Yes, our monitor records usage over hours, days and weeks etc but I do not use those features. It's more of an instant thing, I walk past see 1.2kw in the display and I immediately wonder what is switched ...

I emailed Adam2's comments to Efergy, here is their response: The information written by the person is correct - the voltage is not measured, and so can not measure power factors. So his theory is correct. Electric meters also do not measure power factors of an appliance, and only measure delivered ...

I've been using one of the Efergy monitors which we bought from Maplins for £30 in a sale. Seems consistent but reading Adam2's post it looks like the accuracy is questionable! However, the main benefit for me has been that it is constantly drawing our attention to saving energy which is how we've c...

We got an Efergy wireless energy monitor a few months back along with some timers and remote control plug sockets. Since then we've managed to cut our electricity usage by 58%. Although the only negative is now whenever you walk past the thing and see 1kw current consumption you run around the house...

We wanted some building work doing on the house, spent weeks researching our requirements, spoke to several builders who were very difficult to pin down on time and cost. In the end it took several months before I could finally nail them down this spring. Due to their workload they couldn't start un...

Vortex wrote:Darnation - does this mean that the wide-screen cocktail cabinet with in-built ear de-waxer and convenient storage area for used tampons won't be available at my local branch?

I can let you have my reservation number if you like, I went for the 4:3 version in the end

Pip Tiddlepip wrote:Will we see a return to less use of plastic packaging, putting out fruit and veg in brown paper bags? Will more shops begin to sell loose goods, as in grocers of old?

Grocers? haven't seen one them for donkeys. Our 'local' grocer is a lovely Tesco superstore.

wierd isn't it ~ at the beginning of the week a colleague was asking my advice on where to dig her garden up to plant vegetables , the next day she's telling me how she just spent ?1300 booking flights for a ski-ing holiday next year ~ she would have cancelled but felt she couldn't let her friends ...

...EXACTLY - which means they have ADDED VALUE . . . the convenience of having electricity as opposed to not having it, and security from energy price rises. They will eventually recover their embedded energy in any case, if undamaged - the guarantee is normally 25 years but I would have thought th...

thanks Mitch, didn't consider the regulator cutting out because the battery is fully charged although having said that, maybe it's the other regulator that's at fault by continually showing it is charging. I've got myself a Steca PR1010 which should help as it gives a readout of current output from ...

Hi Vortex,

I think the panels you have bought are very similar to the individual 12W ones I got from Maplin.

As they are amorphous panels they are generally a lot bigger than their monocrystalline counterparts.

Been using my 12w panels for a week or so now. One of them is exhibiting some strange behaviour though. At the moment I have 3 hooked up each to their own controller and 7ah battery. 2 seem to work quite well, generating from early in the morning right up to dusk. Voltage across the panel seems to b...

Tess wrote:...where to start but I'd be writing for an hour and still finding reasons why it's rubbish.

How about a couple of paragraphs? Seriously though, what is your take on it?

interesting take on what is driving the oil price today on Kunstler's Daily Grunt:

http://www.kunstler.com/