Home energy use gets a 'smackdown' on reality TV

[trof]

Medford, Mass. - Most Americans know they should decrease their energy consumption, but many need a push to do it. Three families in this suburb north of Boston got that incentive by appearing on "Energy Smackdown," a reality TV show in which contestants competed to shrink their carbon footprint. The program aired on a local cable TV station during August and September.

With lifestyles ranging from über­environmentalist to highly consumptive, each family was able to bring its footprint down by at least 30 percent in some surprising and "I can't believe I didn't think of that before" ways. All three teams found that, through a little friendly competition, making changes in their homes and lifestyles wasn't as hard as they thought.

"Before the competition, we were like most people, thinking we had gotten all the low-hanging fruit and done all we could," says Mieke van der Wansem of Team van der Nou. "Doing the competition made us realize there are some small things we can do around the house that aren't really that hard to get us over that plateau."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0109/p14s04-sten.html

Some interesting results.

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Dodgy units here - "kilowatts per hour"

Their energy company also donated a power-cost monitor (price: about $150), a small device that is wirelessly connected to their electric meter. It's so simple to use that even their young daughter Anneke can demonstrate it.

"Here it shows how much energy we're using," Anneke says, pointing to the digital display of 0.4 kilowatts per hour, the lowest reading. Then she clicks on the price-conversion button and says, "And here is how much that costs." The lowest meter reading is only 0.4 kilowatts an hour, and the energy auditor told them that now they are actually below that baseline.

So was it actually 'kilowatts' - ie "kWh per hour"? Though I'm surprised the meter wouldn't go below 0.4 kW, in that case - that's still a sizeable power usage. If I knew there weren't any major appliances (like freezers) actively working in a house, I'd want to be able to measure power usage well below that to find appliances using significant amounts on standby, for instance.