For those that don’t know what “The Owl” is I’ll just have a very quick and simple recap.

It’s a device that reads the amount if electricity being drawn from your meter and with the information you enter during set-up ($ or £, cost per kWh, amount of CO2 per kWh produced) it’ll sit in your house frightening the life out of you by telling you how much your lights are costing you.

To do this you need to fit a transmitter to a cable coming out of your electricity meter. There are NO wires to cut into or clip you simply just put a sender around the wire and you are away.

Cost – £29.99 / £34.99
Supplier – http://www.electricity-monitor.com/

There are many other products on the market that do much more and much less but for me this was a great starting point and after 24Hrs of use I’m looking to upgrade to something with Mac/PC based reporting for greater information, but this is an excellent start.

Why we purchased “The Owl”
All you need to do is read the posts on my research in solar power to know that I’m back and forth on if it’s worth it. I needed a better idea of our electricity usage before i could make a more informed decision into alternative energy and if it’s worth the time and investment.

Initial Results
The unit has been installed for less than 24hrs but already it has scared the life out of me how much the plasma TV is using. I’ll be doing a full report this weekend of what applicance costs what to run and how we plan to reduce this. Come back soon.