>Smart home living
There’s no denying it, I am terrible with money. I get paid, then I hit the town like a newly minted oligarch for three weeks, hopped up on boba tea and avocado rolls, buying craft supplies more expensive than gold (“Do you have this Arctic musk ox yarn in fuchsia?”) and dressing my child as a circus monkey. The final week of the month is then spent in shameful poverty, eating Wheaties for dinner, charging my laptop at the library, and training my child for her future career as a circus monkey. I know, I know; I’m embarrassed for myself. I hope at least it makes you feel better about your comparatively sound financial skills.
So you can imagine my total-yetinexplicable surprise and horror when, at the end of a long winter, I opened a bill from our energy supplier that was… hefty. The kind of bill that makes you see spots, or wobble a little and grope for a chair.
“How can this be?” I railed at my husband. “All we’ve done is watch TV and heat the house! And run all of our appliances at once, sometimes just for a bit of kid-subduing white noise!” My husband is a sensible and environmentally conscious man, and had only one solution: a smart energy monitor (of the measuring kind, rather than the computer screen type).
Our energy provider sent two burly guys to do mysterious things to our fuse box and water heater, then set the meter itself on our coffee table and drove off, cackling manically (I like to think, anyway).
The meter has changed me. No more boba, not when the TV is costing 15 cents an hour. We can make coffee at home – although really, do we really need to be heating water anyway? What about iced tea instead?
Wait, look at the meter! Who’s running the air conditioner? Just open a window! And loosen that monkey costume a little, for crying out loud – it’s got to last for another few months.