Exercise equipment like treadmills use a fair amount of electricity during operation, and for exercise gyms that have many treadmills it can be important to understand their energy usage and cost of operation. Another piece of equipment often found in a gym, that uses a high amount of electricity, is a tanning bed. Treadmills typically run 10-60 minutes at a time and tanning beds typically run 10-40 minutes per tanning session.

A simple solution to understanding the electricity usage and costs associated with the various equipment is to use an electricity monitor product like those manufactured by Eyedro Green Solutions Inc at Eyedro.com. They have detailed information on their website but the basic idea is to install their sensors inside the gym’s electrical panel to measure power consumption of the treadmill and tanning bed circuits, connect the Eyedro module(s) to the local network via WIFI or Ethernet cable, and then view the respective power usage and costs in real-time via their MyEyedro monitoring service.

Since the electricity monitor captures power usage 24 hours per day 7 days per week, it is easy to go back in time to see the usage on any given day and time, and even view as daily, weekly, and monthly costs. It will probably be an eye opener to see just how much power the various equipment uses. Since the MyEyedro monitoring service supports various billing rates such as Tiered and Time-of-Use, it is quite simple to see costs in dollars ($) vs kilowatt-hours (kWh).

Most electrical equipment has a stated energy usage and approximate cost of operation at time of purchase, but is that energy usage consistent over time? Probably not because performance can degrade as parts have more wear and tear. If you’ve installed sensors so that each individual treadmill and tanning bed can be measured, it can be very interesting to see the variance between them. It may even be possible to see the degradation in performance before an equipment failure, and certainly it would be obvious if a piece of equipment is no longer being used (likely because it is not working). An electricity monitor can provide significant insight into gym equipment status.

Eyedro claims on their website that they have customer installations in 150+ countries so there is a good chance it will work in your country, but you should contact them before ordering for use outside the USA and Canada.

The MyEyedro monitoring service is free with the electricity monitor purchase. Some of the services included are:

• Highlights where it shows today’s usage relative to expected usage, and highlights differences that may require attention.
• Live Demand shows the real-time electricity usage in Watts. It also allows historical view.
• Consumption shows power usage for any hour, day, week, or month.
• Bills estimate shows the estimated cost of electricity for the current month based on usage to date and estimates the rest of the month based on historical usage.

This article summarized the benefit of monitoring the electricity usage of exercise equipment, but monitoring electricity usage can apply to pretty much anything. For further information regarding the electricity monitor mentioned in this article, please visit their website at Eyedro.com.