The high cost of gas and electricity hits everyone's wallet. Many households are looking for ways to reduce energy consumption. In our home, it is no different. To really take steps, it is useful to have live insight into your consumption so you can immediately adjust your behaviour. Measuring is knowing, right? We recently started using EnergyFlip for this purpose, an energy consumption manager with a handy app developed together with the Consumers' Association. This system goes (much) further than a smart meter. We are finally making real steps to reduce our consumption.
Get a grip on your energy consumption with EnergyFlip
In partnership with EnergyFlip
Energy consumption manager EnergyFlip gives you up-to-date and ‘real-time’ insight into and control over how much gas and electricity your home is currently consuming. We may this system home review along with a very handy solar panel extension kit. With this extension, you not only see what you feed back, but also what you use gross (the latter you don't often see in most standard solar panel apps). In this article, you will read all about calculating the yield of your solar panels with EnergyFlip.
The installation of EnergyFlip
We will be visited by a technician who will install the metering box within an hour. (Because we have a solar extension for the solar panels, we cannot do the insallation ourselves. If you don't have that extension, you can do the installation yourself just fine). From the moment the meter box and app are connected, we can see live how much energy is being used in the house. At the time of connection, the sun was also shining brightly. As a result, we immediately saw live how much we were generating, using and giving back. With the app in hand, you can take immediate action. Surely this is much more convenient than the overview from the energy supplier, which also comes days later and is much more general. Now that the installation is complete, we are ready to scrutinise our own behaviour and discover the energy guzzlers in our home.
Energy consumption manager installation.
Mapping energy consumption: ‘my husband showers too long’
EnergyFlip sees everything, for example that my husband, David, showered a little longer than the five-minute hourglass. I open the app and see that we used 0.49 cents of gas in the morning. In the bar chart, we see two peaks around 8am. The first peak is slightly shorter than the second, together accounting for just under 50 cents. Those were our shower turns. That morning, I was the first to have showered with the hourglass and David followed after. Jokingly, I confront him with these dates and guiltily David admits that he had indeed showered slightly longer that morning.
‘Help our gas consumption peaks’
On another spring morning, I open the app, more with the idea of being confirmed that we are doing very well. And I am startled. We have consumed a euro of gas in the past hour. The bar graph had not shot out like this before. How so? It turns out the heating is still on, with the garden doors open. O no! Every morning the heating comes on automatically so we don't have to get up in the cold. Normally, we then turn the heating to the eco-setting pretty quickly, but we had forgotten to do so. Oops! So that immediately costs you a euro. Since this is not the first time this has happened, the insight with EnergyFlip did make us take action now and put our Google Nest on eco mode permanently, it is spring now after all. We can handle that.
EnergyFlip: ‘is it true that the TV and a few lights are on?’
It is evening and we are lying on the sofa watching TV. I open the app because I am curious to know how much energy we are consuming right now with a few lamps on. I get a notification in the app asking if it is true that the TV and a few lamps are on. Looking at my energy consumption, this could be the situation. Darn EnergyFlip, you are right. But what will happen if I turn off a few lamps? With the app in hand, I take a walk around the living room and see our consumption decrease in increments as I turn on or off our LED lights. Fancy!
You can also see your gas consumption live with this energy manager.
‘Sunny day is wash day’
EnergyFlip's app is increasingly starting to become a daily part of our behaviour. When the sun shines, I check the app and decide to turn on major appliances, such as the washing machine and dishwasher. In this way, we start to know our home and our appliances better and better. We see live, i.e. in the moment, what we consume, track where the energy guzzlers are and, if necessary, adjust our behaviour. And so we make small steps every day to reduce our energy consumption, without losing comfort. The opposite is true: it is starting to become a kind of game to reduce energy consumption and we are having a lot of fun doing it.
Want to know more about EnergyFlip?
The energy consumption manager EnergyFlip was devised in 2017 together with the independent consumer organisation the Consumers' Association. Back then, it was called Householder. In 2021, the name changed to EnergyFlip. ‘Within a year you will have your investment out. Customer research shows that customers save an average of 123 euros per year using the app. This is still calculated with the old energy prices,’ says Eloise van Rijswijk of Aurum Europe, the parent company behind Energyflip. EnergyFlip is independent and completely separate from your energy supplier. Energy companies can therefore not ‘look in’ either. You can conveniently put your own energy contract, the correct rates and expiry date in the app. This way, you can always see in the app exactly what a certain action has cost you.
Do you also want more control over your energy consumption?
Have you become curious about EnergyFlip? With the discount code GREENLIST10, you will get 10% discount when purchasing the supplies. All devices can be ordered online in the webshop of EnergyFlip. The box costs 99 euros, the solar extension kit costs 55 euros. If you have an analogue or digital meter, you will also need sensors (9.95 euros). These costs do not include installation work, for which you will have to ask an installer separately (the discount code does not apply here, of course). If you don't need an extension set sun, then you have no installer needed.
More energy tips from thegreenlist.nl
- On the hunt for the sneaky energy guzzlers in the home.
- Helpful tips to start reducing your gas consumption today.
- Q&A with EnergyFlip: all questions on energy consumption answered.
Photo credits: thegreenlist.nl.
