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    Is Your Single Cup Coffee Maker Costing You a Fortune?

    Is Your Single Cup Coffee Maker Costing You a Fortune?

    by | Sep 8, 2014 | Blog, Electricity Bill

    Dating as far back as the 13th century, coffee is undeniably entrenched in everything we do. Catching up with a friend? Coffee. Important business meeting? Coffee. Trying to function before 9 AM? You guessed it…coffee.

    You may have also noticed that over the past few years, there has been a dramatic shift back to brewing coffee at home. Those wanting to ditch the drive-thru, while saving some hard-earned dollars in the process, are turning to single-cup coffee makers like Keurig and Tassimo.

    With these darling devices being touted as the holy grail of cost-savings and convenience, here at Eyedro we wanted to take a look at the true cost of powering single-cup coffee makers, and what we found was actually pretty surprising.

    Below is a graphical representation of the electricity being used to power our CTO’s home. Using Eyedro’s Real-Time Electricity Monitors and cloud service, it’s easy to zoom in and see how individual appliances actually draw energy when they are being used.

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    Powering On Graphic

    When the coffee maker first powers on, you can see an initial spike. This is the electricity used to initially heat the water from cold to hot.

    Maintaining Water Temp

    After the coffee maker is finished heating up you’re ready to go, but take a look at all the blue lines. Each blue line is the machine using electricity to reheat the water to maintain the perfect brewing temperature. This is why the coffee is always fresh, fast, and ready at the touch of a button. But whoopsies, looks like someone forgot to turn off the machine and the auto-shut-off feature won’t kick in for about an hour.

    Calculating Costs
    Using our convenient What’s It Cost calculator, it’s easy to see just how much electricity is used to reheat your coffee maker. From the live data provided by Eyedro’s Real-Time Electricity Monitor, we see that the machine uses 640W of electricity to reheat the water for about 10 seconds, every minute or so.

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    All we have to do is plug in the information, hit calculate, and boom – now you know that if you’re relying on the auto-shutoff feature you could be wasting an extra $92 a year on electricity, which could have bought you about 51 large coffees from Tim Hortons.

    Just think that for every idle, hidden, or inefficient appliance drawing power in your home or business, there could be thousands of dollars worth of savings just ripe for the picking. So if you’re interested in real-time energy monitoring for your home or business, we’re here to help. Head on over to our products page to get started or simply click below.

    To ensure that your appliances last a long time and use energy efficiently, they must be maintained properly. Here are some tips to help you keep your appliances in tip-top shape.

    Eyedro Energy Management Products

    Case Study – Why Is My Bill So High?

    Case Study – Why Is My Bill So High?

    by | Jul 22, 2013 | Customer Success Stories, Electricity Bill, hydro bill

    billsSometimes a consistently high electricity bill can be a complete mystery, despite your best efforts to uncover the truth.

    One recent Eyedro customer had been struggling for a couple years with extremely high bills but couldn’t identify the cause.  “There were a lot of different factors in play and several changes had taken place in a short amount of time.”  The homeowner had done a significant addition to his home; increasing the size among other things, but also installing a hot tub and geothermal HVAC system.  “I knew the geo system would increase my electricity bill.  I also knew increasing the size of the home would have an impact.”  However, the increase was not in line with his expectations.

    After a couple seasons and seeing consistent winter bills of 90 kWh a day (and almost as high in the summer), a portable electricity monitor was used to help identify the problem.  The homeowner spent weeks trying to figure out the problem.  He was able to load information from the different appliances, but was still unable to understand why the daily usage was so high.  “As expected, the geo was using a lot of power, but when it was on, the kWh were inline with expectations.”  Still, he believed the HVAC was at the heart of the problem.

    Then he installed Eyedro’s electricity monitor.   Within a couple days he had identified the source of the problem, if not the cause.

     

    After making several adjustments to their home they knew their bills would increase, but not by that much.

    After making several adjustments to their home they knew their bills would increase, but not by that much.

    Every day at around 3 PM to approximately 3 AM, there was a dramatic increase in usage.  With Eyedro, you are able to identify that it’s a 220V appliance, reducing it to two or three possibilities.  In the end, the homeowner was able to confirm it was the HVAC system.  However, the system was turned off at the thermostat, meaning no air conditioner or heater running. It was mid-spring and the outdoor temperature was already in the 80’s but cool enough at night to go without HVAC cooling.  So what was the problem.  It turns out the in-floor system used a pre-heat tank before circulating to the two in-floor zones.  While the thermostat was set to “off” and clearly warm enough to not need heating, the pre-heat system was “regenerating” or “pre-heating” the tank for 12 hours a day!

    Customer was able to find a 40% energy reduction in his home just by monitoring where his energy was going.

    Customer was able to find a 40% energy reduction in his home just by monitoring where his energy was going.

    While the exact cause (or fix) has not been identified, with the in-floor system completely shut off manually, the electricity usage has been reduced by about 30 kWh per day, or 40%!