Somewhere, sometime, without even realising it, I crossed the line into “Power Tyrant”. Not a tyrant who is a fan of time management, personal productivity and “getting things done”, you understand – more one of those people who always has one metaphorical eye on the electrical meter.
Part of the blame (or thanks?) has to go to the centameter – a device telling you your current household power consumption, which I’ve blogged about before. The old adage “out of sight, out of mind” was never truer than for electricity consumption. I turn on the electric wall heater (I know, I know, don’t get me started), and the centameter tells me my power consumption has shot up from a modest 0.3 kW to a planet-destroying 5.9 kW. Eeeek!
But I’ve found the power tyrant lifestyle requires surprisingly few concessions. When I had the urge to make this blog entry, I fired up the laptop. Even when plugged in, it only uses 50 to 80 watts or so. In the past I would have fired up my high-powered “beast” PC – gigs of RAM, masses of harddrive, and around 200 watts of awesome processing power….none of which is needed when typing in a few paragraphs of text into a blog!
Never one for self-sacrifice, I still use my planet destroying electric heater (I live in Canberra after all – anyone who knows Canberra will understand the heating requirements!). But the heater no longer gets turned on by reflex just because I’ve walked in the door after work. I come home, I get changed into reasonably warm clothes, look at the temperature guage and actually think about whether I’m cold. And whether, perhaps, a pair of daggy slippers wouldn’t do the job just as well!
There are other examples too – like not filling my 8 cup kettle to the brim to boil water for one cup of tea. Or, after my centameter smugly pointed out my climate-change-inducing 3.8kW power draw when the hot water heater goes on, making sure my washing machine was doing cold washes. All easy stuff, and requires next to no lifestyle-sacrificing either!
There’s no rocket science, obviously. And (having undeservedly acquired the “hippie” nickname at work much earlier 
), I was already aware of all these little power-saving tips. But its amazing what incentive you have to improve when there’s a little white digital meter metaphorically tsk-tsking at you from the kitchen bench.
