Energy use on empty house

southerngal80

We’ve been concerned for a while that our electricity bill is high and whilst we were away last week we monitored the use. 

The meter readings indicated we used 43kwh whilst we were away for 7 days. That’s 6kwh per day….. when nothing Was used. We left 2 TVs on standby and a fridge and freezer. We just can’t understand it. We think something is a miss but not sure what to do. Does this sound high to anyone else? Thanks 

bsms1147

How is your water heated?

QrizB

How old are the fridge and freezer? Modern ones will use less than one kWh per day but elderly ones could use two or three times as much. If they're both ancient they could be accounting for most of your consumption.

matelodave

I've got an energy monitor which monitors my consumption every six seconds and we've been away for a few days - the consumption has been 4.85kwh a day which is an average of 200watts.

That is for an upright fridge and upright freezer, SKY box,Humax receiver, wifi router, several surveillance cameras, the energy monitor, a couple of clocks and the microwave oven - everything else is turned OFF at the wall (ie not left on standby). Even the heating unit was turned off.

The security lights probably turned on & off a few times during the night (two at 10watts each) which probably added to the consumption (the monitor idsplays odd anomolies at random times during the night)

The fridge and freezer are eleven years old but reasonably efficient (or they were when they were new). When we go away for longer periods we often empty the fridge and turn it off - this reduces our daily consumption by around 1.3kwh a day to about 3.5kwh. 

So in general I'd say that your consumption wasn't over the top but It might be worthwhile looking at stuff you might have forgotten.

Anthing left on standby will use some power as will clocks in cookers and the fridge and freezer might be using a bit more than you'd hope. We once had electric recliner chairs which chewedt heir way through 15watts each when plugged in and not operating =15w x 2 x 24 = 0.72kwh/day without even trying.

A plug-n energy monitor would help you identify what stuff is using. Dont forget that you'd need to montor the fridge or freezer over a decent period of time to work out it's daily consumption due to the fact that they only run intermittently.

MWT

A 240W baseload for the OP isn't all that remarkable.

Can certainly try to reduce it, but it isn't generally a remarkable level of use with a fridge and freezer left on and probable a few other small devices that got forgotten. 

Tallerdave

southerngal80 said:

We’ve been concerned for a while that our electricity bill is high and whilst we were away last week we monitored the use. 

The meter readings indicated we used 43kwh whilst we were away for 7 days. That’s 6kwh per day….. when nothing Was used. We left 2 TVs on standby and a fridge and freezer. We just can’t understand it. We think something is a miss but not sure what to do. Does this sound high to anyone else? Thanks 

We used 73kWh last week. Large house, all electric cooking, several loads of washing, dishwasher on every night, computers, TV and, since the heating kicked in most days last week, a few hours of central heating pump too.

So yes, it sounds high for an empty place!

Robin9

@southerngal80  As above the classics are that immersion heater and old fridge.freezers inc American ones. Add in fish tanks, pumps for water features.- that 100w bulb in the attic or under stairs

Time for some detective work - switch off at sockets