EDF Staff | June 28, 2011
By Kerry Downing, Intern, Corporate Partnership Program, EDF
**This is the first of a series of blog posts EDF will run throughout the summer to disseminate energy efficiency tips from EDF Climate Corps fellows. We hope you will find these tips helpful and incorporate them into your organization's energy management initiatives.
As is clear by the recent blogs from this year's EDF Climate Corps fellows at REI and PNC, the 2011 Climate Corps is already diving into the depths of corporate energy efficiency.
The first step for most of them: energy monitoring. It's a simple enough task, but the abundance of energy monitoring options on the market can make it tough to figure out which gear to seek and where to find it. Given their recent encounter with the topic, we turned to Climate Corps for some quick tips. Here's what many of our fellows recommend:
Starting your search: Check to see if your utility has tools for loan. For example, PG&E has a tool lending library. It offers thousands of pieces of equipment and can ship anywhere in the U.S. It categorizes the various tools by (1) what you are attempting to measure (i.e. light, power, etc.), (2) the unit you would like the results to be displayed in and (3) the particular brand you are looking for.
Logging the data: As all good business students know, you can't measure what you don't monitor. Here are a few of the key devices EDF Climate Corps fellows have used to help monitor their host companies' energy use.
- Leviton Light Loggers monitor lighting and occupancy in a given space or room. Many fellows have benefitted in particular from Leviton's Light Logger Loan Program, which offers a free case of loggers for up to 45 days.
- Kill A Watts can be plugged into appliances to display consumption by the Killawatt-hour just like a utility measures it. Kill A Watts can calculate expenses of an individual appliance by the day, week, month or year and can monitor voltage, line frequency and power factor.
- Watts Up? Pros connect to a power outlet and monitor the energy use of whatever is plugged into it. It tracks and averages Watts used over time and comes with a software that allows the user to graph energy use over a given period. This data can be loaded onto a computer and then pasted in a spreadsheet for analysis.
- HOBO Data Loggers monitor temperature, humidity, energy, light, etc. Fellows like them because they can record 30+ days of data and can be set at different intervals for logging.
As our fellows continue to monitor energy use to identify energy-saving opportunities for this year's Climate Corps companies, we hope you too will continue to monitor our blog to see what they find. More to come!
NOTE: EDF does not endorse any of the products mentioned above. These products have simply been recommended by one or more EDF Climate Corps fellows to help monitor energy use.
EDF Climate Corps matches trained students from leading business schools with companies to develop practical, actionable energy efficiency plans. Sign up to receive emails about EDF Climate Corps, including regular blog posts by our fellows. You can also visit our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter to get regular updates about this project.