How much electricity is “normal” in a detached house with oil fired central heating?

cannugec5

I appreciate that this is a very wide guesstimate I am asking for, but I’d really like to know if we are way over average. 

We have a five bed detached house in Scotland. Oil fired central heating. Gas ( bottled) hob with electric oven. There are only the 2 of us retirees living here. We do have electric showers that I am aware are not cheap to run. 

I make (and sell ) jam from home so my dishwasher is used frequently on a 65 degree hot wash to sterilise jars. However the actual jam production uses the gas hob. 

We are in an area that does not yet have smart meters as no mobile signal. Therefore I cannot calculate the ‘damage’ my excessive use of the dishwasher is doing. 

My current electricity use is 7000kwh per year. 

Can anybody tell me how far above average this might be?

comeandgo

I have 4 bedroom detached oil heating, electric oven and hob, showers are not electric and water heated by oil and we use half of what you are using.  10 units a day is a greedy day.  Also in a very cold part of Scotland.

molerat

An electric shower used twice a day can easily use in excess of 1500kWh in a year. But even with that 7000 is on the high side, I would expect your total use to be no more than 5000 tops. A dishwasher should use no more than 1 - 1.5 kWh per full cycle. Immersion heater left on ?  Underfloor heating ?

No tropical fish, reptiles ?  My daughter has an electric shower, pets that live under a couple of 100w UV heat lamps all day and a huge tropical fish tank and gets through around 7000 a year.

Start by taking meter readings a few times a day then move on to daily and compare to what activities you have been doing so you can get an idea of where it is all going.

cannugec5

Thanks  for the replies. 

No, we have no tropical (or other) fish😂. The immersion heater is off. No underfloor heating. 

We don’t shower every day. ( but I can assure you we are clean and smell sweet) . 

I will do more readings and see if I can calculate our use a bit better. 

matelodave

To answer you question, 3500-4000kwh a year would be about right for a place that's not heated with leccy. so yours is about double. As Molerat says,, you need to check around and see what you are using and when. If you dont monitor it you can't control it.

Try reading your meter twice a day for a week or so, just before you go to bed and then when you get up (before turning stuff on - including the kettle for your early morning beverage). That will give you an indication of what your base level is (stuff that's on all night) compared with your daytime consumption.

Electric showers are expensive but you can mitigate that a bit by not standing in them for a long time. What sort of lighting have you got - a lot of halogen downlighters can chew their way through a fair bit whereas replacing them with LED's would save you about 90%. Turn stuff off at the wall when its not in use, don't leave it on standby. Only use the dishwasher, washing machine and dryer when they are full. They use the same amount of leccy as when they are half empty.

Hasbeen

cannugec5 said:

I appreciate that this is a very wide guesstimate I am asking for, but I’d really like to know if we are way over average. 

We have a five bed detached house in Scotland. Oil fired central heating. Gas ( bottled) hob with electric oven. There are only the 2 of us retirees living here. We do have electric showers that I am aware are not cheap to run. 

I make (and sell ) jam from home so my dishwasher is used frequently on a 65 degree hot wash to sterilise jars. However the actual jam production uses the gas hob. 

We are in an area that does not yet have smart meters as no mobile signal. Therefore I cannot calculate the ‘damage’ my excessive use of the dishwasher is doing. 

My current electricity use is 7000kwh per year. 

Can anybody tell me how far above average this might be?

We also have five bed detached farmhouse. Oil heating. Electric oven/hob. Kitchen fridge, Separate's in utility: back-up fridge/freezer, free standing Freezer, Chest freezer on workshop, Tropical fish tank. Pond pump/fountain. Security floods/cameras to cover house, SON lighting to cover yard. 23 security LEDs to cover length of drive.

Recently new dishwasher which is run on ECO used once per week. Old one every few days.

See here for estimated dishwasher usage How much electricity am I using? | Centre for Sustainable Energy (cse.org.uk)

We in the past used a lot more electricity, Circa 12000kWh but now appear to be at 6700kWh per year.

Due to LEDs, hopefully better energy utilisation.

We are with Symbio, 12.997 kWh and 19.048 SC +Vat. But perhaps better deals depending on location?

Click here for cheaper providers with actual yearly usage: LINKY 1  and LINKY 2

See if you can make any savings?

brewerdave

5 bed detached here in S.Wales. No electric shower, all hot water /heating by gas but we still get thru 5500kwh pa. I'm sure we could trim 1000kwh off that - less use of dishwasher, tumble dryer in Winter etc and newer freezers.

tim_p

brewerdave said:

<snip>

 and newer freezers.

When I replaced an ancient (when we dumped it, ancient when we got it many years previously) Skandinova tall fridge freezer our electricity consumption dropped by 20% literally.

coffeehound

Do you have the manual for your dishwasher, OP?  That should state directly how many kWh the wash cycles use, though it will cost more at this time of year with perhaps 6º incoming mains water to be heated up.  If you don't have the manual you could state the make and model and someone can look it up online.

If you divide 60 by the power rating in kW of your shower, it gives the number of minutes use to consume a unit of electricity.  From that you can extrapolate your weekly/monthly/annual consumption.  As an example, the highest power instant showers (10.8 kW) use a unit of electricity about every five and a half minutes.   

Oh also, do you use the oven to dry the jam jars out before filling?

cannugec5

coffeehound said:

Do you have the manual for your dishwasher, OP?  That should state directly how many kWh the wash cycles use, 
Oh also, do you use the oven to dry the jam jars out before filling?

Thanks. Yes I've got the manual. It states 0.73 kWh per cycle - but that relates to the eco cycle which is 280 minutes long and indeterminate temperature.
I do not need to  dry the jars in the oven, as the hot wash cycle includes a drying function..

matelodave

I suggest that even if you guess that yours uses 1kwh for a cycle and you use it twice a day for 365days a year, it's only going to work out at 730kwh at 15p/kwh = £110 per year which TBH isn't really a kings ransom (and you'd have to be making a hell of a lot of jam to use it twice a day for a year).

It's not hard to do the sums and work out what stuff uses and how much it costs.