Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

Energy use feels like an amorphous concept — unlike a fast-food transaction in which I know that five dollars gets me a third of a pound of artery-clogging goodness, it’s tough to visualize just how much leaving the living-room lights on all nights will cost me. General Electric has created a slick energy-awareness app that shows you how much each appliance costs you. Not just in terms of money, either. It shows kilowatt consumption, gasoline consumption, as well as showing how much use you can get out of a single kilowatt.

You can adjust costs according to the state you live in, since it costs a lot more to run your furnace living in Alaska than it does in North Carolina. I also found out it costs $0.77 per year to run my VCR, which is a lot of money for something that only flashes “12:00″ all day long. I also found out that a kitchen mixer could mix 300 bowls of batter on a single kilowatt, a clear indication I’m not eating enough cookies.

You could use this app in a variety of ways. Naturally, you could tie it to an energy/environment lesson, but you could also come up with interesting math and science activities as well. For example, give your kids a really stingy monthly budget that forces them to cut out several appliances, then ask them to choose which appliances they’d keep and why. Have better ideas? You almost certainly do. What can you do with the Home Energy Appliance Use application?

Home Energy Appliance Use

Related stuff:

Get real-time global statistics Worldometers

Examine energy issues at Powering a Nation