Download our editable Loop Snoop map. Save this to your laptop, tablet or mobile device. You’re going to use this to record the running costs of all the appliances you test.
If you measure it, you can control it. Simply seeing how much your electricity is costing you has an impact on how much you use. It’s called the “Feedback Effect” and leads to easy savings through changed behaviour. Some households could save hundreds of pounds, so it’s well worth getting clued up!
Using your smart meter’s in-home display to get real-time readings, follow the steps below to take back control of your energy use. You might be surprised by how much some of your things cost to run.
Download our editable Loop Snoop map. Save this to your laptop, tablet or mobile device. You’re going to use this to record the running costs of all the appliances you test.
Turn off all your appliances (apart from your fridge, freezer and any other essential appliances) so you have the lowest possible ‘background’ energy use in your home. Your background energy use should comprise only those appliances that you have to have on.
Use your smart meter’s in-home display to see live electricity use. You can toggle between £/hr and live electricity consumption in Watts. Make a note of this background energy usage in £/hr.
Now go around your home, room by room, turning appliances on and off, one at a time. As you turn each one on you will see your Live £/hr cost change on your smart meter’s in-home display. Do some simple maths to reveal the cost of having that appliance turned on for one hour. Record this on your Loop Snoop map as a reminder to turn stuff off!
If you need more inspiration, check out our extensive list of cost-cutting ideas.
Doing this in each room will give you a pretty good indication of what things cost to run. However it’s worth remembering that some high-powered items like ovens, fridges, freezers and immersion heaters are thermostatically controlled. This means they draw a lot of power when they’re on, but they aren’t on permanently, only when they need to heat or cool to the required temperature.
Loop user: “It was a real eye-opener on how some lights for example were consuming eight times the electricity than others for equivalent brightness, and also that our old tumble dryer was so inefficient it was contributing nearly a third of our monthly bill!”
Loop user: “By looking at the power being used and turning off an individual appliance I can see how much it uses on standby. Using that method I worked out the coffee machine was sucking power when it wasn’t turned on – now it gets turned off at the wall switch!”
