22 kW per hour – is that good?

I’ve now received the energy monitoring device and installed it on our 3 phase (I’m learning all the technical lingo) electricity supply in the office.  To do this I had to identify the 3 wires emerging from the meter and into the consumer unit (fuse box), and clip sensors which somehow pick up the energy being consumed, and send the data to a remote LCD display.

As of 3pm today the display is telling me we are consuming around 22kW of electricity per hour, which equates to 22kg of greenhouse gas per hour.  Now I need to check the electricty bill to make sure I am reading this correctly, and also that the calculation of carbon is as expected.

Suffice to say I have no idea if this is good or bad for a company of this size and type, with this many employees, but at least I can start to benchmark our relative performance as we attempt to reduce.  I will plot the usage over the next few days to see what we are doing hour by hour, and publish in a post early next week.

It’s great to start seeing how much we are currently using, already I’m actually looking forward to seeing how much we can reduce through some of the more basic energy saving techniques.  This afternoon we’ve been playing with the air conditioning in the offices, and managed to reduce the consumption by a couple of kWh, so I think is going to get people thinking….

Next step is to attach the individual power meters to some of our workstations, and to open up to the team here at Armstrong for ideas on reduction.