You can also employ an army of mini penguins that live inside closets. If a light is on and no one is in the room, they go out of the closet and turn it off. But you have to leave opened cans of herring around the house in order that the penguins feed. The penguins’ guano can be used as fertilizers for your garden.

The first bit of this is awareness of consumption, and there are now a number of very good devices that will sit on your counter-top and give you a real-time reading of electricity use.

The second bit is that you have to be motivated to make the change. I am saving well over $100/month on my electricity bill from the changes we make. Incentive programs and dinner-table discussions with the kids help them see this as a fun thing.

And if incentives don’t work, there’s always corporal punishment — it seems to work for my wife to keep me in line, can’t see why it shouldn’t work for the kids too

Tom

Especially “The switch uses a network connection and electrical lines to transmit data on the energy consumption level.” So the light switch needs to be connected to a computer to tell someone that the bathroom light was left on too many times? Also what happens if the network was down, could you not turn on the switch at all?

I get the point, but disagree with the approach. A timer switch would work much more efficiently, and would eliminate the need for any other external power drains. Alternately, something as simple as a digital readout of the meter would have a similar effect.