How much electricity do you use?

[Reorte]

A bit over 1600 kwH here, although that's one person in a two bed house with gas heating (which includes the water for the shower). It's electric cooking but I don't cook every day, since there's a canteen at work. I do spend quite a bit of time playing games on a high-end computer though, I think the PSU for it is 600W but it won't be running at that most of the time. There's also a fan constantly running the cellar to try get a bit of ventilation in to it.

 

I rarely tumble dry, putting up one of those old-fashioned ceiling drying racks cut down massively on the amount of tumble drying.

[Torper]

Its' difficult finding out an average usage for a home that doesn't have gas - most averages I've seen assume dual fuel usage.  For a 4-bedroom detached house, however, you can forget about 2500 - the average is likely to be over 4000kWh, considerably more than that if you have elctric heating and hot water.

 

As far as we're concerned two of us are home all day living in a stone built mid terraced house built in about 1850.  There is no gas in our village, so everything is electric save for heating and water, which are oil fuelled. The loft has basic insulation and sarking.  We don't have a tumble drier, but do regularly use the electric oven and hob, dishwasher, washing machine, rather old fashioned and therefore not the most efficient fridge/freezer and additonal chest freezer, LED lights throughout and otherwise all the normal small items.  Oh, and we have an electric shower which is quite power-hungry - some people (not us!) apparently deem it neccessary to shower at least once, sometimes more, every day and that must increase electricity costs.  We don't have economy7.  We're not as careful with usage as we should be although we are becoming more so.  Usage 2021/22 was 4284kWh and having read what the OP uses it seems to me that we use a similar if not greater amount than he does.  I wonder if the OP has compared his current usage with pre-Smart Meter usage?

 

DT

Edited September 30, 2022 by Torper

[spamcan61]

2 hours ago, teaky said:

  The chargers seem to be a high proportion of your consumption so I'd look at minimising their use and/or on-time.  

 

 

Speaking as an electronics designer I find those charger figures very surprising.  Maybe these are device ratings, which will be absolute worst case, rather than actual consumption figures.

A phone charger will consume 10-20 watts, not hundreds, or something will be melting. 

The laptops again look like peak ratings, I can't find a high end laptop to measure in the lab at the moment, but a Dell laptop with a 65W power supply  I've just measured did peak for a second or two at 60W during boot, but runs at about 15W when booted and charging. 

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, spamcan61 said:

The laptops again look like peak ratings, I can't find a high end laptop to measure in the lab at the moment, but a Dell laptop with a 65W power supply  I've just measured did peak for a second or two at 60W during boot, but runs at about 15W when booted and charging. 

 

For interest I measured my work setup a while ago. Laptop, 32" monitor, Amazon Echo Show, and a small stereo came to about 950Wh over a working day.

[spamcan61]

11 minutes ago, 30801 said:

 

For interest I measured my work setup a while ago. Laptop, 32" monitor, Amazon Echo Show, and a small stereo came to about 950Wh over a working day.

So about 120W average power (unless you have a very long or short working day), which sounds reasonable. 

Edited September 30, 2022 by spamcan61

[kevinlms]

4 hours ago, AndrueC said:

 

Edit again: When you compare the average was that for other E7 user? If I remember rightly E7 is more expensive during the day. I would definitely want to move washing machine and drier use to the night time. Dishwasher as well if you can.

 

(*)The issue with standby power isn't the impact on a single bill. It's the impact on the environment of millions of people.

You have to be careful here. Establishing the times of peak/off peak is very important and in some places this has changed significantly to that of the past.

 

In Victoria, Australia the 'peak' time is 3pm to 9pm, the rest of the day is 'off peak' 7 days a week. This was not the case until fairly recently. This is because, the highest average usage is for air conditioners and in fact in summer, it is a considerable peak of usage. I believe in the UK, the highest usage is in winter, although, if you continue with summers like the last one, things may change!

 

So I would check your suppliers web site and properly identify the peak rate times. If you don't, you MAY be robbing yourself, by using certain appliances at the wrong time of day.

[admiles]

2 hours ago, AndrueC said:

I model in N so I'm already reducing my power requirements. I feel sorry for the OO and O guys - must be really hurting 🤣

 

Nah my big Heljan fleet live in their foam lined boxes to keep them nicely insulated and warm. Energy consumption.....zero! 🤪

[Jonboy]

13 minutes ago, kevinlms said:

You have to be careful here. Establishing the times of peak/off peak is very important and in some places this has changed significantly to that of the past.

 

In Victoria, Australia the 'peak' time is 3pm to 9pm, the rest of the day is 'off peak' 7 days a week. This was not the case until fairly recently. This is because, the highest average usage is for air conditioners and in fact in summer, it is a considerable peak of usage. I believe in the UK, the highest usage is in winter, although, if you continue with summers like the last one, things may change!

 

So I would check your suppliers web site and properly identify the peak rate times. If you don't, you MAY be robbing yourself, by using certain appliances at the wrong time of day.

The economy 7 setup in the uk runs typically midnight to 7 or 8 am (the 7 standing for 7 hours) and is aimed specifically at heating. Typically a house with it will have two separate electrical distribution circuits.

 

One that has all the plug sockets, lights, cooker and shower circuits and is live all the time. It will likely also have a boost circuit for the hot water tank that feeds an element towards the upper half of the tank.

 

There is then an off peak circuit that will only come on in the off peak hours and is controlled by apparatus alongside the meter(s). This will only supply storage heaters and an element towards the bottom of the hot water tank (heating the whole tank, not just top half).

 

 

[Michael Hodgson]

46 minutes ago, spamcan61 said:

Speaking as an electronics designer I find those charger figures very surprising.  Maybe these are device ratings, which will be absolute worst case, rather than actual consumption figures.

A phone charger will consume 10-20 watts, not hundreds, or something will be melting. 

The laptops again look like peak ratings, I can't find a high end laptop to measure in the lab at the moment, but a Dell laptop with a 65W power supply  I've just measured did peak for a second or two at 60W during boot, but runs at about 15W when booted and charging. 

Yes.  Far too high for a couple of mobile phones or an electric toothbrush, but it obviously depends on what you're charging. 

It will obviously be higher if you charge an electric car or a mobility scooter,

[AndrueC]

23 minutes ago, Jonboy said:

The economy 7 setup in the uk runs typically midnight to 7 or 8 am (the 7 standing for 7 hours) and is aimed specifically at heating. Typically a house with it will have two separate electrical distribution circuits.

 

One that has all the plug sockets, lights, cooker and shower circuits and is live all the time. It will likely also have a boost circuit for the hot water tank that feeds an element towards the upper half of the tank.

 

There is then an off peak circuit that will only come on in the off peak hours and is controlled by apparatus alongside the meter(s). This will only supply storage heaters and an element towards the bottom of the hot water tank (heating the whole tank, not just top half).

An ex-friend of mine found that his house was on E7 when he moved in but it had gas CH. From looking online it appears that you can have a simpler dual-tariff version with only one circuit:

 

"For a retrofit, the standard e7 meter will simply record all use in the day at day rates, and all use at night at night rates, and additionally switch on the extra ciruits (in your case the storage heater circuits) at night. Your current water heater would keep on its existing ciruit, therefore available all the time, but if you wanted a new e7 compliant tank, you'd have a new cirucit only on at night to drive a new immersion (at the bottom of the new tank), and your existing immersion circuit would stay as it is, driving your existing immersion situated at the top of the tank, whenever you wanted."

 

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3747349/confused-about-what-wiring-is-required-for-using-economy-7

 

He moved it to normal tariff because E7 made no sense for him.

 

 

Edited September 30, 2022 by AndrueC

[zarniwhoop]

I too have economy 7 without storage heaters (it was installed when I bought the place in '93) - in those days I mainly used it to run the washing machine in the early morning. As AndrueC says, all my consumption during the 7 hours of economy rating is at the low rate.

 

I used to bake bread and similar frequently, with the pre-pandemic panic I mostly stopped (couldn't get the flours I wanted), then eventually resumed - but less frequently. Until a couple of weeks ago I had not been baking breads because it was too warm to put the oven on high. Got a notification this week of the new rates from tomorrow, daytime leccy up from 37.2p/Kwh to 49.8p, night time from 14.14p to 7.85p!  It often suits me these days to be up at night, so I am now planning to bake after midnight.

 

For the OP I would review how much you use the oven, and at what temperatures.

[Dave John]

If you are calculating consumption don't forget to include hard wired static loads.

 

Mains smoke alarms, burglar alarms, timeclocks, outside lights with PIRs, security cameras  and even a mains doorbell transformer can all add to the total. 

[ejstubbs]

5 hours ago, chris p bacon said:

If you are using 6500KW a year ...

 

The projected consumption is 5993kw per year ... 

 

I find it mildly ironic that an otherwise fairly authoritative post should be the first one on this thread to make the mistake of muddling watts and watt-hours, including the brain-fryingly annoying "kW per year".  Arrgghhh!

 

Mind you, I do often think it would be easier if domestic energy consumption were measured in Joules.  At least that way people would be less likely to get confused between energy, and the rate at which it is consumed.

 

I won't mention the incorrect usage of the SI unit abbreviations in two separate instances.  Oops, I just did...

 

(For clarity: any unit whose name derives from a person's name has an upper-case abbreviation* e.g. W, N, F, H,  J, T and K for Watt, Newton, Farad(ay), Henry, Joule, Tesla and Kelvin respectively*.  The abbreviations for all prefixes representing negative powers of ten are lower case - including µ which, although not a character found in the Latin alphabet, is the lower case form of the Greek letter mu.  The abbreviations for prefixes representing positive powers of ten are lower case for the first three i.e. deca, hecto and kilo, and upper case for the rest.  Using a lower case abbreviation for hecto and kilo I can understand, since it avoids confusion with the abbreviations for the actual units henry and kelvin.  I assume that deca gets a lower case abbreviation so that it doesn't stand out from its neighbours; it helps to avoid making the rule even more complicated than it already is.)

 

* Although the full name of the unit doesn't, just to confuse things.

* Actually that last one was his title, 1st Baron Kelvin, rather than his actual name: William Thomson.  But having been ennobled (the first British scientists to have achieved such recognition) he adopted the usual practice of signing himself simply "Kelvin", and he would have been referred to as such.

[AndrueC]

..and a shout out to a personal hate of mine when people refer to their internet connection speed. There is a huge difference between 100mb/s (pitiful and probably slower than 19th century telegraph), 100Mb/s (plenty for most domestic properties in the UK at the moment) and 100MB/s (way more than most domestic properties in the UK currently need).

 

And when someone uses 'kilofeet' I always feel like shouting out - "You chose your multiple units, so it's your problem. Stop stealing our prefixes!"

 

😀

Edited September 30, 2022 by AndrueC

[Damo666]

Probably immediately falling foul of ejstubbs nomenclature.

 

5 bed detached house. 4 adults (Mum, Dad and 2 adult children early 20s). Plus frequently Father-in-Law staying.

 

12 months elec usage to Sept 2022           5,505kW

Don’t know how much my solar panels offset during the sunny days.

 

Gas units 819 units = 9,259 kWh  (39.8 Calorific Value x 1.02264 correction value / 3.6 Units conversion to kWh). This seems high compared to others here. Gas furnace warm air heating.

All LED lighting

Put 180mm insulation on top of the existing 350mm insulation in loft a few years ago.

 

I’ve started to turn off non-essential smart speakers, Raspberry Pi, extra wireless point, items on standby etc. I’ve labelled all my power charger adaptors to see what they use in Watts. Those in my office are all turned off at night.

[Reorte]

45 minutes ago, AndrueC said:

And when someone uses 'kilofeet' I always feel like shouting out - "You chose your multiple units, so it's your problem. Stop stealing our prefixes!"

 

I've heard that the Navy uses kiloyards, which just makes me scream "make your mind up which system you're using!"

[RFS]

2 hours ago, AndrueC said:

An ex-friend of mine found that his house was on E7 when he moved in but it had gas CH. From looking online it appears that you can have a simpler dual-tariff version with only one circuit:

 

"For a retrofit, the standard e7 meter will simply record all use in the day at day rates, and all use at night at night rates, and additionally switch on the extra ciruits (in your case the storage heater circuits) at night. Your current water heater would keep on its existing ciruit, therefore available all the time, but if you wanted a new e7 compliant tank, you'd have a new cirucit only on at night to drive a new immersion (at the bottom of the new tank), and your existing immersion circuit would stay as it is, driving your existing immersion situated at the top of the tank, whenever you wanted."

 

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3747349/confused-about-what-wiring-is-required-for-using-economy-7

 

He moved it to normal tariff because E7 made no sense for him.

 

 

 

We have E7 with a single circuit so all overnight usage is charged at E7 rates. The electric CH boiler receives a signal from the meter when E7 is active and it only charges normally whilst it has that signal. There is an override (that we rarely use) that allows the boiler to top up during the day if it has run low. 

[ejstubbs]

13 minutes ago, Damo666 said:

I’ve labelled all my power charger adaptors to see what they use in Watts.

 

As spamcan61 pointed out above, the power ratings shown on the cases of such devices will be the maximum they will draw.  What they actually use will depend on the needs of the device drawing the power from/through them.  In the case of the four-way USB charger I have plugged in by my desk, for example, it is rated as being able to deliver 4200mA at 5V.  It then says "21W" which is, surprise, surprise, what you get when you multiply 5V by 4.2A.  However, with nothing plugged in to charge, my plug-in mains power meter struggles to detect any kind of meaningful power draw.  Sit my phone on the wireless charging pad plugged in to one of the USB sockets and it shows 9W, which is close enough to being right for a "fast charge" USB port rated at a maximum of 2A on its own.  Of course, that's with the phone's battery depleted.  When it's fully charged it goes in to "trickle" mode and the consumption drops accordingly.

 

In days of old there was a deal of truth in the advice not to leave things on standby, but since the EU regulations on standby power consumption came in to force it's steadily become much less of an issue as people have replaced their "legacy" equipment over time.  They pale into insignificance in comparison to things like tumble dryers (don't get me started on them - the Energy Saving Trust says that a a tumble dryer uses roughly 4.5kWh per cycle, that's more than an EU-compliant device would consume sitting on standby for a whole year).

 

There are certain things in my house that don't get turned off in the normal course of things.  These include fridges (2 of), my NAS and other networking equipment, and my computer.  That latter needs to stay on to do the 'out of hours' jobs that run on it on a regular basis, such as network backups, though it is quite good at powering down bits of itself, such as the screen and the HDD, that don't need to be on power while I'm not actively using it and it's basically just waiting for the next background task to become due.

[Neil]

Worth thinking about your fridge/freezer, it's possible to have an A or AA rated unit, which would sound energy efficient but where the insulation has broken or is breaking down so that it's running for far more of the time than it should. If it makes loads of ice and needs frequent defrosting then the inusulation is on its way out.

Edited September 30, 2022 by Neil

[Nearholmer]

7 hours ago, teaky said:

Looking at your spreadsheet, Ian, the top two items leap out at me. 

Absolutely.

 

Tumble-drying 0.7 hrs/day all year round seems really high, even if it actually means 1.5 hrs in ‘winter’ and nothing in ‘summer’, and the charging seems really high. What are you charging?

 

To me, it all looks ‘a bit high’, even the lighting and the model railway*, all the sort of numbers that you’d want to trim. Even the lighting looks high - 150W is a heck of a lot of illumination with modern LED fittings.

 

I would attack this the other way round, by turning everything off, and switching back on, an item at a time, to look for the ‘villains’.

 

You haven’t accidentally left the electric immersion heater on in the tank have you?
 

*450W is massive for a layout, equivalent to about 60x 00 or 0 locos circulating at once.

 

 

Edited September 30, 2022 by Nearholmer

[AndrueC]

18 minutes ago, ejstubbs said:

In days of old there was a deal of truth in the advice not to leave things on standby, but since the EU regulations on standby power consumption came in to force it's steadily become much less of an issue as people have replaced their "legacy" equipment over time.  They pale into insignificance in comparison to things like tumble dryers (don't get me started on them - the Energy Saving Trust says that a a tumble dryer uses roughly 4.5kWh per cycle, that's more than an EU-compliant device would consume sitting on standby for a whole year).

I run a dehumidifier through the winter months (more to avoid condensation on windows and help with occasional indoors drying) but every year I do a Google on power usage and most articles take the typical rated power and

multiply by 24. They do still say 'fairly low usage' but it's the wrong way to calculate it. Mine has now been running for a couple of weeks and is off more than it's on.

 

But then there's the whole 'greater than 100% efficiency' thing and 'less moisture in the air means less heating required'.

 

 

18 minutes ago, ejstubbs said:

There are certain things in my house that don't get turned off in the normal course of things.  These include fridges (2 of), my NAS and other networking equipment, and my computer.  That latter needs to stay on to do the 'out of hours' jobs that run on it on a regular basis, such as network backups, though it is quite good at powering down bits of itself, such as the screen and the HDD, that don't need to be on power while I'm not actively using it and it's basically just waiting for the next background task to become due.

Yeah, I have a mail server so my router and modem (still using a HG612!) stays on 24/7 but the wifi is a separate AP so that gets cut at 11pm as does almost all of my A/V kit. Although funnily enough I had to replace the mail server and the new kit locks up occasionally (it's Windows but there's no blue screen just frozen) so now it shuts down every night at 1am and the power is cut between 2am and 5am. Anyone sending me an email during that time will just have to wait :)

 

I thought about powering off the modem and router but didn't have any spare timers. Also whilst I don't worry about the DLM impact of powercycling the modem once every 24 hours the router doesn't always get an IPv6 session when rebooted so I'd rather leave it alone.

Edited September 30, 2022 by AndrueC

[spikey]

37 minutes ago, Reorte said:

 

I've heard that the Navy uses kiloyards, which just makes me scream "make your mind up which system you're using!"

 

But at least they've finally stopped measuring capacitance in Jars 🙂

[Oldddudders]

No idea what my consumption is. It's been some years, I think, since anyone sent me paper copies of such stuff - I pay by Direct Debit. I do have a smart-meter, have no idea what to use it for, but it avoids having to let someone in to read the meter. When we moved here - tumbledown detached 1850 cottage in an acre - in 2004, the elec company set our tariff at €160 p.c.m. Now in 2022 it is €171 p.c.m., so life has got cheaper over those 18 years. I cook by bottled gas, which probably costs me less than €40 p.a., apart from oven, air-fryer and micro-air. Admittedly these days I spend time in Torquay with Mrs OD Mk II, but even so, and with all heating etc electric, the fact that every August there is a reconciliation of what I paid and what I used, and this year I received a rebate of several hundred €, implies I am not overpaying. 

 

My tariff gives me cheap rate from 01.00 to 08.00, and again from 12.30 to 14.00, so those two slots get used for washing and dishwashing, and the immersion heater. Not a tumble-drier fan for reasons explained by others - poor value for cost of operation. 

 

I did get a letter the other day urging me to look at doing all the good things people have described here, because prices will rise. Not much I can change, really. At 74 in November, I do need a warm house. 

[Jonboy]

Don’t overestimate the power drawn by a modern heat pump condenser dryer. Ours only  uses around 1kwh to 1.5kwh per load and is only rated at 900 watts…

[johnofwessex]

When I had Economy 7 in a previous house we had the washing machine on a timer to run overnight.

 

I would get up and pt the washing into the dryer then go for a shower before the E7 went off

 

Worked fine until one cold morning we blew the 'Company' fuse.

 

A few weeks later a phase  on the transformer serving the village 'blew'