It is worth mentioning that family finances are among the hardest-hit by the global economic downturn. The crisis has prompted households to take the matter of budgeting seriously. Today, families are adopting cost and energy saving methods by considering different ways by which utility bills paid to the power company every month can be reduced to the barest minimum. Many homeowners are likewise employing tools that can help in monitoring home energy use. Fortunately, the government issued the stimulus package and renewed public attention to energy savings. A number of companies saw the need and pounced on the opportunity to develop and eventually market wireless energy dashboards that can be used to keep track of energy data from your power meter and inform you if you’re being an energy hog. In addition, President Obama pledged to help utilities install an additional 40 million smart meters. Such meters are essentially digital meters that create a 2-way connection with the utility and the power grid. Smart meters can provide data about the fluctuating cost of electricity throughout the day, allowing consumers with energy management tools to switch power consumption to the time of day when energy is cheapest. Utility meters are great measurement tools so try to get into the habit of reading the electricity meter on a daily basis. Monitor your energy consumption on a graph or in a spreadsheet and track changes or fluctuations. In case your daily readings spike, try to pinpoint the cause. Spikes in usage serve as a warning that something needs to be checked. And when your daily readings begin to fall consistently over time, you know you’re doing something right in terms of saving energy. There are also plug-in electricity monitors that can help you determine how much electricity a certain device or appliance consumes. You simply plug the device into the meter, and it shows readings for watts of power used, including kilowatt hours over a period of time. These meters can be used to gauge how much electricity you're losing to phantom loads like AC to DC converters or anything with an LCD or LED display. Such devices can use up power even when nothing is plugged into them. You can also use plug in monitors to correlate actual electric consumption of an appliance to what the manufacturer's claims say. If they don’t match, then you can make the necessary adjustments as to the settings or configuration of your appliance. Another category of tools is the full-house electricity monitors which can track your home energy consumption in real time so you can examine usage change as different appliances are turned on and off, thereby identifying those that require the most power. However, these monitors are more expensive and not as useful as plug-in monitors in determining how much power a given appliance uses. Aside from the aforementioned tools, there are a lot more available in the market as more companies try to find ways to help save energy while saving the environment at the same time. In the end, what really matters is for all of us to be eco-conscious and help raise awareness about the importance of saving energy



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