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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
