According to the official stats, the appliance that uses the most energy around the home is the tumble dryer. The humble, innocuous, helpful tumble dryer. So innocent. So demure. And all the while it’s been draining us of money. A kick right in the back. Apart from that, the ones to look out for are fridge-freezers (I knew it!), electric heaters (especially of the kind that glow red) and televisions. But mostly, really big televisions. Mine is tiny and still has little knobs to change the volume, so I think it’s probably fine. Also, I never use it. It’s not even plugged in at the moment.
See, this is why I volunteered to learn more about the industrial energy monitoring. The goal was to get an idea of how the average Melbourne home uses their power, but I was worried that the ‘average’ didn’t include compulsive energy savers such as myself. I might have exaggerated ever so slightly on my form and told them that I was an average user. The way I see it, I’m doing all of Melbourne a favour by including myself in the sample group. I try to only eat salads and foods that don’t require cooking, I don’t own a microwave and I wash and dry all my clothes by hand, the natural way. The only real way clothes CAN be washed in my opinion. Why would you waste energy watching them turn around in a machine for hours on end? Same with a dishwasher. You lose sight of the wonders that come with washing things by hand. Anyway, I really hope I’M helping the cause. I managed to convince my father to add commercial energy storage to his factory recently and he’s already seeing savings. They go perfectly with the solar array he had installed a few years back.
In a way, I always have been environmentally conscious. Thankfully I don’t need to store energy since I hardly ever use any. Oh, except for air conditioning. Got that one going ALL summer. But I don’t think it uses all that much power, so it doesn’t really count.