Overnight electricity consumption

ajbell

How much power do you use from about midnight through to 8am?.
I am using around 0.6 kwh and am trying to figure out where it goes.
Fridge and freezer are on, BT router, alarm clock, electric toothbrush.
Guess it's going to be the fridge and freezer which are about 15 years old.

DREKLY

that's pretty good, about 75 watts /hour, you could try turning the
freezer off if it's a separate item, for one night, that will tell you how
much that's consuming, but I bet the fridge takes more than the freezer.

Martyn1981

If it helps, I got an energy monitor 'thingy' from Maplins in December and started testing a few items.

Over 3 days the fridge (6yrs old, under counter, and kitchen sited) averaged 0.2kWh per day. The freezer (2yrs old, large (2m?), located in a cold(ish) garage), averaged 0.4kWh.

So, over 8hrs, that would be about 0.2kWh, but for older appliances and if within the heated envelope, perhaps 0.3kWh+.

Also worth considering if the heating (GCH?) comes on before 8am. If so, then with the pump running it's probably pulling around 100W.

After accounting for those, anything left seems quite low, and impressive. Don't forget that 12V chargers in sockets and switched on may well be drawing power even if no item is charging, just check to see if they feel warm. Also you may have a large number of clocks running, not just bedside ones, but cooker, microwave etc, and they all add up too alongside those pesky red LED's!

Sterlingtimes

I have a myriad of "always on" little gadgets and I did carryout a full audit. I even have two mouse repellers that I initially overlooked. My base load average 220 watts. I can see in my Ovo measurements over night "notching" caused by the on and off switching of one chest freezer, one under counter freezer and one larder fridge. So an overnight 8 hour cycle would typically equate to 1.76 kWh.

ajbell

Only took 969 kwh from the grid last year which is about 2.65kwh per day.
Generated over 4000 kwh.

pinnks

We are more energy-hungry than others who have posted as we import about 2,200kWh per year. But we do have 3, 2m tall fridge-freezers and some always-on things like security camera, router, Virgin media box, email server and so on.

We typically use about 2kWh between midnight and 8am (assuming no generation before 8am). I too bought one of those energy monitors (about £14 from memory) and it is a real eye-opener. For instance, my extension lead with earth leakage had been plugged in in the garage for years. I found it draws 2W when just plugged in, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That is 17kWh per year - ouch. I also logged average daily energy of everything over the course of a year. Our old fridge-freezers vary. The oldest one (1988 Liebherr) costs about £29 per year. The newest from about 2010 (Miele) £45 and the middle one from 2006 (Liebherr) about £70. That has been decommissioned as a result and our new Liebherr A+++ larder fridge costs about 80kWh, £8 per year.

TV amps, network switch and Velux window motors suck 20W continuously or 175kWh per year. I bought a G-Homa Wi-Fi switch to turn them off when not needed (£16 at the moment in B&Q). That is probably 95% of the time as the wired network is only used for printing and similar devices and the main TV is freesat, not freeview, so no TV amp being used,

The DECT phone sucks 3W permanently; the microwave 4W just switched on and believe it or not the coffee machine takes 1.5W permanently just switched on! The AV amp has pass-through capability but needs a whopping 39W, so that too has a G-Homa switch now. The Virgin box is 14W but not much you can do about that. The list goes on.

The moral, invest £15 or so in a monitoring socket and roam your house for a few months logging permanent energy drain and daily energy for things like fridges and you should be able quite easily to reduce you base load by at least £15 per year.

Crowmann

Not sure how folk get down to such low consumption levels here?

We are all LED, no power on without cause and a base load of circa 200w - we used 3000kwh last year and diverted 2000kwh from the iBoost with I estimate a further 1000kw supplied to cover base. The iBoost serves hot water and a 2.7kwh storage heater.

In other words we chomped our way through 6000 kwh - just the two of us with nothing left to cut back on!

Note we are oil heated with electric showers and cooking. Last year we used around £500 of oil at 35p a litre.

Sterlingtimes

We have gas central heating and gas hot water but still import 4,257 kWh a year and retain 2,015 kWh a year in solar generated electricity, a total usage of 6,272 kWh a year. Laundry measures in at 1,617 kWh a year and base load at 2,014 kWh a year. So the remaining 2,641 kWh a year must be attributable to other periodically switched on devices.

pinnks

Apols if I may have confused folk a little. My 2,200kWh is import. I generated about 4,400 and used 70% of that for house and diverting to immersion heater/radiators. We too have GCH and hot water. Our actual annual use was just over 4kWh (excluding diverted excess) with import of 2,200.

ajbell

Any one use battery backup?. Its something I am looking into next.

Ben84

The base load of our house is almost always 40w. I've cut it down to this by turning off appliances that have standby mode at the socket. Things with small power switches don't actually switch the mains supply on and off, they have a circuit that's always waiting for you to turn the appliance on - and that consumes a few watts for each device.

Some big standby items I found in our house were the TV set top box, the internet modem and router, and the dishwasher. I hardly watch the TV, so just turn the digital box off between uses. I replaced the modem and router with a newer, combined unit, which roughly halved that. It was time for a new one anyway. We did also have a section of the house on a second router - so I ran cables from the new router to those devices so it wasn't needed any more. Sorting out our messy internet things was probably the biggest change. Plus turning off the dishwasher at the socket, because it somehow uses 10w while doing nothing.

Our remaining base load is things like the boiler programmer, the new modem-router and the fridge. I couldn't tell any difference between having the phone charger plugged in or not, so haven't worried about those.

Crowmann wrote: »

Not sure how folk get down to such low consumption levels here?

We use around 3-9 kWh a day for a household of three people. A big part of this is that we cook and heat radiators/water with gas. The shower is electric, but it's quite easy to save with that since it turns on and off so fast. Turn it on, get wet then turn it off and use the soap. Turn on once more to rinse off. So, the heating element might need to be on for 2 or 3 minutes for each shower.

Our electric use only really goes up notably on the couple of days a week when I wash clothes. At this time of year I often use the dryer too - but it's an efficient condenser one and sends the heat in to the house, so it contributes to space heating. In warm weather I never use it. Majority of our lightbulbs are LED now, except those little used ones in the wardrobes and things. When I boil the kettle I have to cover the element, but then I save any spare hot water in a thermos, Not sure it would pay back any time soon to buy one just for this, but I already own one so might as well use it to save energy. I also swapped my big old computer for a laptop, which is far more energy efficient. Our fridge is a small under counter model, but 30+ years old, so that could be a place to save in the future. I have however moved it to a cooler location in the kitchen (old larder) to stop it turning on so much.