By Kasia Her, WWG student
Recently the Westbrook Walnut Grove Earth YES! class performed an Energy Audit Project in our school. The high-school’s energy usage was calculated by students who were each assigned five to eight different rooms in the school.
In each room, students measured all electrical appliances using a kilowatt meter. A kilowatt meter is a device used to find the amount of watts, kilowatts, and volts used by a particular electrical appliance [see example Kill-A-Watt meter in YES! kits]. To do this, the students plugged the device into the wall and plugged the electrical appliance to the device. After finding how many watts are being used, students converted watts into kilowatts. We also asked each teacher how many hours they use each of the electrical appliance a day.
Knowing how many kilowatts an appliance uses and how many hours the appliance is used, the students could calculate the kilowatt-hours (kWh). Knowing the total of kWh of the appliances in our school, and our electricity rate, the students calculated how much the high school spends on electricity for these appliances.
This project enabled us to use the kilowatt meter and a few calculations to find that our school appliances use about 488 kilowatts a day. Spending $31.73 a day or $951.90 a month on electricity for our appliances alone!
Photo courtesy of: http://www.moody.af.mil/energyinitiative.asp
