Vending misers are actually quite expensive--around $200. We couldn’t afford to buy one for our school. Then we heard about a company that would give us a vending miser if we could use statistics to show how much energy the device saved. We entered the competition and won our vending miser using quantitative analysis--a method that uses numbers to analyze a situation.
So how does “quantitative analysis” work? Let me explain the process. Our first step was to measure how much energy our vending machine used without the vending miser. We used a Kill-A-Watt Monitor. It measures the energy consumption (in Kilowatt Hours (KwH)) of any electrical device. We discovered that the vending machine uses 49.06 KwH in one week. We then installed the vending miser, and used the Kill-A-Watt monitor again. We found that the vending machine used only 31.65 KwH in one week with the miser, which means that there was a savings of 17.41 KwH per week. 1 Kilowatt costs about 10.6 cents1 in a school. So that means that if we saved 17.41 KwH, we could save $1.85 per week, or $96 per year! If we bought a vending miser in the future, we could pay it off in less than 2 years.
There are many ways in which you can use this approach to identify energy savings in your home or at your school. Say I placed two washing machines next to each other. I knew that one was Energy Star rated, but I didn’t know which one it was. How could I find out which one used less energy? The answer: by using quantitative analysis. I have explained the process, and now you can sniff out those energy hogs and save energy for our planet!
Written by Youth Venture Ambassador--Chloe, Climate Action Club
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