You can’t know how much energy you waste until you know how much you use. One of the best ways to gauge your energy use is to do what the utility companies do—read your meter. These precise, ever-watchful yardsticks keep the gas and electric companies informed about every kilowatt and cubic foot of energy consumed in your house. They can keep you informed, too.
For the most part, you are probably keeping yourself in the dark about how much energy you use. When the utility bill rolls in, do you glance at the “amount due” column, make some silent and fruit less objection, and grumble as you write out the check? By the time you read your bill, it may have little obvious relation to your prior energy consumption. The “amount due” doesn’t appear to you as the oven you forgot to turn off, or the windows you left open and the furnace you left on high” when you went away for the weekend, or that tiny leak in the bathroom faucet that drips hot water no matter how tightly you turn the handle shut.
Utility meters ordinarily are located outside the house, or someplace else that might make them hard to see on a regular basis. This means that you have to make point of checking on them if you’re going to learn how to read them. You must make them a deliberate part of your energy awareness.
A highly-recommended exercise for every member of the family who’s old enough to care about such things is to turn off everything electric in the house and stand in front of the meter, watching the dials closely. Then have someone else turn on the electric appliances, one at a time and one after another. Keep watching the meter—as the hands be gin to crawl around the dials, you can actually see how your energy is used.
Electric meters calculate your kilo watt usage over a specific period of time, as gas meters measure the cubic feet of gas you use. Both electric and gas bills always include a starting and a stopping date; it’s between those dates that you pay for your use of energy. If you want to watch your energy consumption for a particular time period, be sure to note the dates of your readings.
Electric and gas meters are read straight across, from left to right, like English. However, some of the small dials within the large frame of the meter turn clockwise, and some turn counter clockwise. Be sure to notice which is which when you take your readings: the individual dials always move from 0 to 1 to 2 and so on up to 9 and back to 0. Whenever a hand falls between two numbers, read the lower of the two. Thus, the electric meter in our illustration below reads: 54698 kilowatt hours.
If you go away and come back a day, a week, or a month later, you’ll see that the hands on the meter have advanced on their dials. From this number, subtract the earlier number. The number you’re left with is the number of kilowatt hours of electricity you used between readings, or the number of cubic feet of gas. A kilowatt hour will light ten 100- watt bulbs for one hour, or ten 200-watt bulbs for 30 minutes, or ten 50-watt bulbs for two hours. A therm equals (1) 29.3 kilowatt hours, under conditions of perfect efficiency, and (2) 100 cubic feet of natural gas, and (3) the heat/fuel that on average central-heating furnace will burn in one hour.
Older-style Electric and Gas Meters: Some electric meters have
a direct read-out as above left. Most have dials as above. Both of these
have the same reading, 54698 kilowatts. The gas meter, left, reads 385200
cubic feet. Modern meters have digital readouts and computer/wireless
interfaces.
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