Recently active topics in iMeasure

Have you seen the Age of Stupid? What did you think?

AOS is a new movie premiering last week. It stars Pete Postlewaite as the narrator & then has the real life stories of about 6-8 people: A french mountaineer in Mont Blanc, a wind engineer in the UK, 2 Iraqi children, a medical student in Nigeria, an oil worker from New Orleans, & an Indian business man setting up the 1st cheap airline. Pete is in 2065 living in an archive of civilisation looking back to 2008 to see what were we thinking - we knew climate change was happening yet did very little to act. http://www.ageofstupid.net/

The film gives lots of room for thought, however, the stories of action, inspiration and the possible for successfully tackling climate change are left undiscussed, which I found frustrating. There is an AOS campaign running outside the film, but what I really want to see is storytelling of climate solutions within a film.

Best, Catheirne

Hi all, Been using Imeasure for a while now, really like the idea, and how I can see what's going on with our energy usage.

I would like to see if people have any idea's on ways that we can all save more energy/reduce co2 and ultimately costs. Does anyone have links to websites with relevant info, I know you could just google for them, But wouldn't it be nice to have a good source of recommended sites listed here as well ?

Things we have done so far to improve the efficiency in our home :-

1) New double Glazing, (95% energy rating, Opti-white front glass, Argon Gas Filled, and Pilkington K-Glass Inner with a 40mm gap) compared to our old 20yrs old wooden framed ones.

2) Cavity Wall filled, polystyrene balls type

3) Loft insulation, twice as much as recommended as its very blustery and large space

4) Underfloor Insulation using Kingspan boards 600mm thick.

5) New central heating boiler (not the best on the market but it claims to be A rated), all rads fitted with thermo valves, and digital room stat set at 20 oC max. ( it is on most of the day from 8:00 till 22:00 hrs, we do turn it off if the house feels warm, main reason for it being on all day is that I have a disabled partner and she tends to get cold quick, through lack of movement)

6) The Main living room is also Wall insulated with foam backed plasterboard on the gable end ( the end that gets all the weather)

7) Polystyrene roofing (old left over of the days when everyone used the cracked ice effect, its a fire risk really and should be removed but we did it back then in an attempt to help keep some heat in the house)

8) Flat roofs converted to pitched roofs and double insulated, with reflective kingspan and polywool.

9) All spaces between the dormers and windows fitting are also filled with kingspan.

10) Most of the rooms are Energy efficient bulbs 7w types, and only used when we enter the rooms, other than that they are off.

11) All Tv's are LCD type with energy modes on, so the back light dims automatically depending on room brightness.

Things we haven't done :

Left the Airspace between the lower and upper floors un-insulated due to moisture retention as some air flow is needed to keep the joists dry/stable. This is a real big bug bear for us as the majority of the heat we think is escaping from here, as the joists run from front to back and the wind that blows through them is amazing... was thinking of installing some ducted fans in there and make a small wind generator :)

So I throw it over to you, is there anything else you can think of, or know were doing wrong that could help us improve on our ratings.

As our average spend according to the new Imeasure is around £28 a week combined... is this good ?

The house is a 3 bedroom semi-detached built 1960's known as a dormer bungalow / chalet type

Thanks in advance :D

I recently had my Gas meter exchanged, which is standard practice with my gas supplier to exchange every 2 years or so. My replacement was a refurbished meter, and had a non zero start figure.
I now have 2 gas meters on imeasure. If I delete the old 'replaced' meter, will all my readings dissappear?

Since the revamp my carbon per person keeps changing. Today I experimented and increased the house occupants from 2 to 4 and the carbon badge per person rating went from C to E - surely it should be the other way around e.g. C to A?

It looks like you're taking the household carbon as the per person carbon and multiplying up rather than dividing down. Obviously we might be wrong. It's difficult to check ourselves but I base this on the graph. It doesn't change when you change number of occupants so the graph must be household carbon consumption. You then state this same figure as per person on the same page.

Are there some coding issues with the results page? My results say insufficient data but I have 18 weeks worth of meter readings ?? Last week I experianced the same effect mentioned by others that my rating went from A to C !! (I have the following error message Undefined variable: w in /home/imeasure/public_html/ratings.php on line 100) but I can not see any incomplete entires on my user daetails.

Regards

Kevin

The option for a second electricity meter is great. My property has 2 gas meters ! any chance of adding the option for a second gas meter ?

Hi imeasurers,

A number of people have emailed at bit confused about entering their weekly readings if after the "weekending date" listed. The weekending date is always the sunday, but because sundays are 24 hrs long the box for entering readings doesn't appear until 12:01 am on the Monday.

We offer the option of specifying the number of days after the week ending date you have taken your readings in order to calculate the last 7 days' (i.e. the last week) energy use. For example, if you took a reading on a monday one week and then your next reading on the following thursday that would be 11 days difference. So if you specified that the second reading was taken 4 days late then imeasure calculates the daily energy use and multiplies by 7 to estimate how much energy you used over 7 days. However, if you always take your readings on a tuesday there is always 7 days between readings so no need to specify it is late.

We took the approach of saying when your next reading was due in hopes it would help the habit of meter reading. However, please don't feel you have to read you meter each week if that is not convenient or the way you want to use imeasure. imeasure will still calculate your energy use between readings.

I hope this clarifies a bit more how imeasure works. We are developing a new version of imeasure in which it will be possible to specify the date you have taken your readings.

Best, Catherine

We are doing some work to improve imeasure & would love to hear from our imeasurers about what improvements are most wanted. We don't have much funding - but are aiming to improve the results page - especially the graphs and tables to make the results clearer and more digestible. The glitch in the carbon clubs will be fixed as well as we add a few more features to the carbon clubs so users get more than just a ranking for each of the clubs they are members. Finally, we are doing some much need housekeeping to improve the input of data so people don't run into problems when their meter changes or switches.
Please to post your thoughts on imeasure.

Thank you, Catherine

Are there any plans in the pipeline where we can add our own energy unit costs? For example, my electricity cost per unit is 15.225 per kWh which is quite a bit more than your 12p kWh estimate. Same senario with gas...

Second box required for Economy 7 (night units - electricity)
How are we to measure accurately if no night time units are registered.
I guess we are to calcuate the night units used and add them to the overall electricity reading,but that largely negates the need for this type of calculator.
Ant

Are there any plans to add water consumption monitoring?

Jumping between 31 and 0 kWhs per week is too coarse for a weekly reading. You need to accept readings with tenths of a gas unit.