For those of you who don't know, my family and I have been testing out the Smart Meter and occasionally blogging on this site. I installed the thing last October and after the initial excitement of turning things on and off to watching the fluctuating numbers and watching money burn, the novelty has worn off. Worse still I’m not sure where the small green and white monitor has gone, it's about the same size as a packet of fags - hang on I'll look under the fridge..... Eureka, there it is, nestling in a clump of dirt with a few old peas stuck to it. But, it is obviously quite robust as it is still working. So, here we are four months of smart meter ownership on. What difference has it made? Energy monitors have been shown to cut energy consumption by up to a quarter. As they cost around £50 (90 euros) they pay for themselves in about a year. This is just about believable as they certainly have made my family very conscious of how much energy we waste by leaving lights on. At any moment I can walk about the house and find lights left on especially by the kids when they've already left for school. We have now changed many lights to low energy bulbs (but I hear there is a backlash against proposals to ban old bulbs as people claim the low energy ones cause migraines and epileptic fits). But at the same time as we are saving energy, prompted by our meter, our general consumption is rising as we buy more electrical goods. A great big, flat-screen t. v., a wii, 2 new Nintendo’s and sparkly laptop all arrived at Christmas (thanks to Father Christmas). And this is a general trend. Energy consumption increases year on year. We buy more, we fly more so even if we try more to save more we're fighting an uphill battle. One greenish thing to do is to make sure you buy the most energy efficient product. According to the Guardian newspaper, the website www.Sust-it.net shows how much energy different home appliances use. For example, a 42inch plasma t. v. from Phillips model 42PF5521D costs £79 per year to run which is almost half that of a Fujitsu P42HTS40GSBS at a cost of £133 per year. But when I tried this site it was full of ads and impossible to use. So we are back to turning off and turning down our power. And I remain sceptical that all of this makes much difference. My next step is to find out how we can generate our own power - wind turbines, solar panels and ground source heat pumps, here I come.