Strangely enough, this is nonsense. The many and variety of ways that each person can make a difference has been reported in almost all media for several years. The continuing problem I feel is instant results. People like instant results.

A quick scan online for products to help solve the growing feeling of frustration rife in my household turned out to be surprisingly fruitless. There are a range of products available which give a read out of power usage in your house. But these are absolute values. The problem with an absolute value is you have to know 1) what your measuring, 2) the value that each appliance contributes and 3) its a bloody number. Who cares if that number one minute says 5 and the next minute says 50? Clearly something has changed but this presumably happens constantly throughout the day.

I continued my disenchanted search and finally came across wattson. Like the other devices, Wattson gives you an absolute value which is essentially useless to the layperson. But! If you plug in your rate of pay, it can forecast your yearly bill.

Wattson is also a wireless box so can be placed conveniently where you are likely to look at it. Not just in the kitchen. He will emit a glow of blue, purple or red depending on your electricity usage to encourage lower consumption.

Not to mention the digital output that allows you to study usage over time. At last, a relative reading! The wobbly line is made of absolute values but placed in a display you can clearly see the trend going up or down which is a great help. You would never go to a meeting with a Powerpoint of figures. You go with charts because people understand them.

Designed by three graduates from London College of Arts, it is the most attractive and persuasive tool for lowering electricity bills I have seen so far.

Click here to buy one now from Firebox!

Ben Rogers recently graduated with a degree in Geology from the University of Edinburgh. You can follow him on Twitter: @BonjamonRogers

Here’s a little tip from the lovely folk at Method that we spotted a while ago on their blog People Against Dirty…

When you’ve finished filling up your car with fuel make sure you do up the petrol cap nice and tight – it should click three times – otherwise some of your fuel will evaporate. It’s estimated that millions of gallons of petrol are lost this way every year!

An OWL arrived at LovelyCompanies.com HQ over Christmas and I thought it was worthy of a quick review…

The OWL is a nifty little mobile device that you can put anywhere in your house and it displays your current electricity usage in a couple of different units including pence/hour and kg of greenhouse gas/hour.  A little sender unit clips onto the wires going into your fusebox and transmits the necessary info straight to your kitchen table!

It’s fascinating to watch the impact that various devices have on our electricity usage – the kettle, iron and electric heater seem to be the worst culprits! It also makes us think twice about leaving things plugged in overnight.

It’s only £29.95 with free delivery. Check it out:
http://www.theowl.com/

We search the internet for the best organic, green, environmental, and natural online retailers and negotiate with them a reward level which can be passed on to the moreeco registered users. For every 10 points a person earns, moreeco offsets 1kg of carbon!

It’s a little like Fund it Frog but with an environmental twist! What a great idea – click here sign up now!

“Marrying the market with the environment is the defining challenge of our day. If you can find a way of ensuring that waste, pollution, the use of scarce resources become an actual financial liability, then businesses are going to design these things out of the way they do business.”

I’d say that sounds like an exciting opportunity for any lovely company…
Why not start with chocolate?

I was once told a story about a company struggling to persuade it’s employees to switch off their computers at night. Management had tried everything and had run out of ideas. One night a couple of employees held back as everyone went home. They waited until everyone else had left then they prowled round each desk and wherever they found a computer that was switched off, they deposited a small box of chocolates on the keyboard. After this lap of the office our heroes stole off into the night.

The next day there was a great buzz in the office about the mysterious chocolates. Who had left them? Why were they only on a few desks? Would there be more chocolates the next day?

There were indeed more chocolates the next day and this time on a few more keyboards than before…

Eventually people began to cotton on to what was going on and within a few days everybody in the office was switching off their computer before they went home at night.