How much electricity do you use in a day?

the_optimist

tr3mor wrote: »

Have you read any of this thread?

Unplugging a phone charger will have virtually no effect on your daily usage.

Yes, I have, and can't find any mentioning about mobile phone chargers. I have read about it in different threads but am not convinced that you don't save anything. Since there is no need to have the phone charger plugged in when not in use, I don't see why you should leave it in.
I am well aware that the savings would be A LOT less than, for example, not using the tumble dryer, but I feel that everything that can be done very easily (like switchen things off) shoul be done, and I work on the other items as I can. 'Every little helps' as Mr T puts it

lellie

the_optimist wrote: »

Yes, I have, and can't find any mentioning about mobile phone chargers. I have read about it in different threads but am not convinced that you don't save anything. Since there is no need to have the phone charger plugged in when not in use, I don't see why you should leave it in.
I am well aware that the savings would be A LOT less than, for example, not using the tumble dryer, but I feel that everything that can be done very easily (like switchen things off) shoul be done, and I work on the other items as I can. 'Every little helps' as Mr T puts it

The changes you mentioned certainly don't account for the change from 14 to 9 units though.

the_optimist

lellie wrote: »

The changes you mentioned certainly don't account for the change from 14 to 9 units though.

I agree and I didn't say that (well, at least I didn't mean to say that). I did use the washing mchine twice that day, plus the dishwasher plus the tumble dryer for about 15mins (to finish drying). I thought it was that, but have used all those since then and unit use seems to stay at about 9 units. Slightly puzzles about this but will get to the bottom of it ... eventually;)

ViksB

Cardew,
I apologise if I have been misleading. I was only trying to be helpful.
I didn't believe the readings we took either. One thing that is definetly true is that we are now paying half the electricity that we were.
As you said it may be that we have dodgy appliances and turning them off helps. They are certainly old. We don't have a sky box or a plasma TV (despite dh wanting one), it might just be a fluke.
It may also be that since doing this we have been thinking more about electricity useage and have therefore used less.
I don't know but all I care about is that electricty useage is half what it used to be.
Long may this trend or fluke continue for us and if the useage does suddenly go up as quickly as it went down hopefully I will be able to figure out what is causing it.

Sorry for any confusion.

Viks

Quote:
We were using 20 units a day until we turned everything off!! Turned TV, video and aerial booster off at the wall, anything with a clock (except the alarm clock) gets turned off at the wall when we are not using it. The showers get turned off to stop the little red light shining. Any plug sockets with a red light when they were one are turned off.
Basically anything with a light or clock is off!!
Our electricity is now down to 8 units a day which is still high as the bulk of our heating is oil.
Hope this helps

I appreciate that you are trying to be helpful, but this is typical of the misleading information that gets put about.

You are claiming that by switching items off standby you are saving 12 units(12kWh) a day – that is 12,000 Watt/hours.

Even if you didn’t use your appliances at all (e.g. TV, video etc never switched on) that would mean you have a average standby consumption of 500 watts and that just isn’t feasible. In practice this would probably mean an average of 700-800 watts on standby.

Even if you left your TVs(except a Plasma), & Videos fully on with sound & picture 24/7 I doubt you would be using that much power.

As an experiment I once measured the standby consumption of the many appliances in my house. TVs, videos, PC, microwave, oven, 2 Sky boxes, and it was about 40 watts and 28 Watts of that was for the 2 Sky boxes.

Just add up the standby consumption of your appliances(TVs are typically 0.5 to 3 watts etc) and you will almost certainly have a standby consumption of less than 50 watts. Unless you have Sky Boxes 20 watts would be nearer the correct figure.

So if you are saving 12kWh a day, it certainly is not down to standby wattage that any normal house would have; and you must have some faulty equipment.

Rather than saving 12 units a day most houses would save less than a unit a day by switching everything of at the wall.

Worth having etc etc but let’s get things in perspective.

the_optimist

We seem to use about 9 units a day. Once it was 14, today it was 12, but I have found the culprit: DD. On both occasions she charged her mobile phone over night. From now on they get charged during the day and disconnected when fully charged!!!

bigpaws23

I'm still using 20 units a day. This seems like quite a lot to me and I really don't know what else we can do to cut back.

If anyone would share their info, I'd find it helpful to know of your average daily usage with figures like number of people living in your house, perhaps size of house and if you have gas as well for cooking, heating or water.

We are:
20 units daily
3 of us living here (2 of us at home all day)
4 bedrooms
electric only, but using wood for heating.

Bigpaws x

the_optimist

bigpaws23 wrote: »

I'm still using 20 units a day. This seems like quite a lot to me and I really don't know what else we can do to cut back.

If anyone would share their info, I'd find it helpful to know of your average daily usage with figures like number of people living in your house, perhaps size of house and if you have gas as well for cooking, heating or water.

We are:
20 units daily
3 of us living here (2 of us at home all day)
4 bedrooms
electric only, but using wood for heating.

Bigpaws x

We are 9-10 units a day
3 of us (there's usually someone at home)
4 bedrooms end of terrace
gas for heating & cooking & electric

Cardew

the_optimist wrote: »

We seem to use about 9 units a day. Once it was 14, today it was 12, but I have found the culprit: DD. On both occasions she charged her mobile phone over night. From now on they get charged during the day and disconnected when fully charged!!!

So you are of the opinion that a mobile phone charger will use 2kWh (2 units)overnight? That means it is rated at about 200 to 250 watts. I hope the charger is water cooled! It will need to be or the power unit will melt!

Most mobile phone chargers draw 3 to 4 watts even when charging a flat battery. So if it was constantly charging flat batteries 24/7 it would take 3 or 4 weeks to use 2kWh.

tr3mor

the_optimist wrote: »

We seem to use about 9 units a day. Once it was 14, today it was 12, but I have found the culprit: DD. On both occasions she charged her mobile phone over night. From now on they get charged during the day and disconnected when fully charged!!!

Are you being ironic? Or just stupid?

ScoobieGirl

bigpaws23 wrote: »

I'm still using 20 units a day. This seems like quite a lot to me and I really don't know what else we can do to cut back.

If anyone would share their info, I'd find it helpful to know of your average daily usage with figures like number of people living in your house, perhaps size of house and if you have gas as well for cooking, heating or water.

We are:
20 units daily
3 of us living here (2 of us at home all day)
4 bedrooms
electric only, but using wood for heating.

Bigpaws x

That does sound like quite a lot

We use
7.5 daily
2 people
gas CH & Water

Our useage is a lot higher than it could be as I use the dishwasher on normal wash instead of economy (Yes I know I shouldn't use it at all ) And I use the tumble dryer as I don't really have a garden.

So how many baths/showers do you have? That seems to be the main difference, unless you are running your tumble dryer every day. Do you top up the wood burning fires with any fan heaters?