Typical household electricity baseload

tiggerpud

I will definitely be investigating further on this. We have already significantly reduced our bills this year by using excess solar generation & being more vigilant at turning things off. I run a boarding cattery so heating during the winter months adds a massive amount to our bills - weather has been particularly mild so far this November which has helped enormously. Hubby has also now fitted timer switches on heating so we can control them much more effectively - thermostats should hopefully be installed this weekend too....

Hopefully others will post their base usage figures too so we can see between us "the middle ground"! At the moment we seem to be at extremes!!

Update: After a family exercise of going round turning stuff off, we can still only get down to just over 400w...... Admittedly we haven't turned off things like printers, routers, etc but anything that is reasonable to leave off is now off...................

lanstrom

tiggerpud wrote: »

We use approx 500Wh at night....

That is quite a lot. I use about 350w and that includes a fridge and 2 freezers (1 of which is full height and G rated - about as bad as it gets !). Just been to have a look and the sticker on it says the consumption is 756 kWh per year ... Yikes !

Hope that helps.

larkim

Took some time yesterday to set up the clamp better on the cable that I've chosen, and I think I have some slightly altered results!!!

With the same equipment attached we were at about 275w base consumption last night, which feels much more in line with others experience here. I got my power meter out too to check some of the devices which also confirm that the 27w reading was completely nuts!

e.g. - PVR - 12w in standby, Wii - 11w in standby (in "connected" mode, now switched off and down to 2w in standby), powerline adaptors - 5w (each, there are two of them). So those alone would have topped the 27w reading. I'll be on a mission this weekend to see the impact of switching off other bits of kit overnight.

Bearing in mind 275w x 8 hours x 365 days = 803kWh, at 13p = £104 of night time electricity. Let's see whether I can save £20 or so and recoup the cost of the monitor!

Matt

The_Green_Hornet

I'm on Economy 7 and my nightly usage works out at 4 kWh per week so my base load would be about 82w (4000/7/7).

For this I have the following appliances on overnight:

- 'A' rated Fridge/Freezer
- Freeview HD Recorder placed in standby
- Microwave Oven display
- House Alarm System
- Broadband Router
- Cordless Telephone
- Central Heating
- Alarm Clock
- Solar PV Inverter

I pay 4.39p per kWh for overnight energy so this costs me £9.13 annually (4 x 4.39 x 52).

HappyMJ

The_Green_Hornet wrote: »

I'm on Economy 7 and my nightly usage works out at 4 kWh per week so my base load would be about 82w (4000/7/7).

For this I have the following appliances on overnight:

- 'A' rated Fridge/Freezer
- Freeview HD Recorder placed in standby
- Microwave Oven display
- House Alarm System
- Broadband Router
- Cordless Telephone
- Central Heating
- Solar PV Inverter

I pay 4.39p per kWh for overnight energy so this costs me £9.13 annually (4 x 4.39 x 52).

Why are you on E7? Are you mad? At 208kWh per year that's barely 6% of your annual usage assuming your annual usage is average at about 3,300kWh total. Move onto a standard tariff ASAP and you'll save quite a bit.

KevinG

HappyMJ wrote: »

Why are you on E7? Are you mad? At 208kWh per year that's barely 6% of your annual usage assuming your annual usage is average at about 3,300kWh total. Move onto a standard tariff ASAP and you'll save quite a bit.

Absolutely - you want to at least want to be running relatively high power things like washing machines, dishwashers, immersion heaters overnight to justify it.

larkim

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7

Seems the ballpark (depending on the tariff the individual is on) is "do you use 2/3 of your electricity at night", which on the basis of 208kWh per year seems highly unlikely!!

Having never had an E7 setup I hadn't appreciated how expensive getting it wrong could be!!

Matt

The_Green_Hornet

All very interesting advice but without anyone knowing my actual energy consumption or electricity tariff not very useful I'm afraid and way off the mark.

Hint: My winter overnight electricity usage is considerably lower than the spring/summer/autumn.

HappyMJ

The_Green_Hornet wrote: »

All very interesting advice but without anyone knowing my actual energy consumption or electricity tariff not very useful I'm afraid and way off the mark.

Hint: My winter overnight electricity usage is considerably lower than the spring/summer/autumn.

You told us the tariff and the annual energy consumption. 4.93p/kWh. (4*4.39*52) There are 52 weeks in the year are there not.

Hint: That makes it even worse. Your night usage should always be more in winter than summer. Even if you were the most frugal consumer of electricity and only used those items mentioned then your whole bill would only add up to 715kWh. That's highly unlikely.

At that percentage any tariff will be cheaper on standard rates than E7 4kWh a week is nothing.

zeupater

Hi

I'm pretty happy with the performance of our OWL .... I've even been very, very sad and actually balanced the house load with the inverter so that the electricity meter is stationary but not held by the ratchet in order to check how close the readings are ..... The real problem is that devices like an OWL measure the Amps and deduce the Watts using a standard mains voltage .... that's where most of the inaccuracy comes in as the Voltage varies throughout the day ....

Anyway, baseload here is below 50W, jumping up to somewhere around 250W if the fridge & freezer cut in at the same time ..... currently running the house at 260W to 380W as the picture on the TV changes .....

27W is far too low with everything listed turned on ... Are you sure that you're not reading 0.27kW as 27W, when it should be 270W ? ..... the other possibility is that you could be reading a net figure during the day depending on the layout of your wiring ?

HTH
Z