Typical elec spend or usage in a house of 4?

gottago

Hi, I'm moving into a student house of four soon and I'm trying to get a relatively accurate quote for electricity.

Does anyone know how many kilowatts of electricity is typically used by a house of 4 and how much that would normally be?

Thanks!

Swipe

How will you heat the house? Gas or electric? As you are probably aware, 4 students in a house will not reflect a typical family of 4 occupants so it will be very hard to guestimate. Consumption will depend greatly on the students' attitudes to energy usage.

gottago

It's a gas heated house.

I know but I can't think of any other way of getting an almost accurate estimate! I'm very energy concious whereas sadly the others do leave stuff on when they leave the room.

Swipe

As long as the others don't start firing up electric fan or convention heaters the cost shouldn;t be too significant in that case. I'd hazard a guess at around 20kWH per day during winter time but I'm more than happy to be corrected should my estimate be way off.

macman

The vast majority of your energy expenditure will be on heating and hot water, so it's really the gas bills you should be worrying about.

gottago

Swipe wrote: »

As long as the others don't start firing up electric fan or convention heaters the cost shouldn;t be too significant in that case. I'd hazard a guess at around 20kWH per day during winter time but I'm more than happy to be corrected should my estimate be way off.

Ok many thanks!

grahamc2003

macman wrote: »

The vast majority of your energy expenditure will be on heating and hot water, so it's really the gas bills you should be worrying about.

... with the emphasis on 'should'.

My experience of sharing houses and flats includes 2 separate instances of people (girls) who liked to come home to a warm room, and therefore left an electric heater on all day (in addition to gas ch which I thought was set too high anyhow). Another case was a bloke who like to save money on drying in the laundrette, so brought all his wet clothes back (or washed them there) and then used a fan heater for several hours to dry them.

I'd agree that with averagely sensible people, the (expected quite high) electricity use should be around £2 per day, or about £40 each per term (or semester if you're posh).