Domestic Electricity Use 8000-10,000kWh pa

MoreApples

I’m looking for help with our surprisingly high electricity use of 8,000-10,000kWh a year. From July 2021-July 2022 we used 8396kWh. Previous years have been up to 10,000kWh.

Background Info
The house is an old Scottish farmhouse from the 1700s and 1800. It’s build of stone. It has 5 bedrooms, 3 reception rooms and 2 bathrooms. Size-wise I figure it’s similar to two 3-bedroom houses combined. The family who owned it before us did a major update from its 1970’s style with new wiring, redone bathrooms and kitchen and double glazing. 

It has GCH and 2 electric showers with 1-3 showers taken per days. We have an American-style fridge freezer plus one small fridge and freezer. There is one small, non-fancy TV, a PS4, 2 laptops, 1 iPad and 3 phones. There are 4 electric blankets used for 9 months of the year. The lightbulb have been changed to low energy although there are a lot of them - spot lighting in the kitchen and 3-5 in the bedrooms. Four of us live here. We are out 4 days a week. We do not own any high consumption devices/appliances (e.g. hot-tub or gaming PC). We have an infrared heater in the kitchen the is on at mealtimes in winter. We use convection heaters when the kids get dressed in the morning in winter for some extra heat. The washing machine and dryer are no more than 5 years old. Washing averages every second day. The dryer is used in winter but I line dry as much as possible from April to September or beyond when possible.

In the 70s and 80s the house was owned by a family who commercially farmed tomatoes. Apparently there were greenhouse and folks had summer jobs picking tomatoes. The greenhouses are no longer. I don’t know exactly where they were but do find bits of glass and probable metal frame parts buried in the garden.

Regular readings in March averaged 18kWh a day. Currently in warm August it’s averaging 11kWh/day

So far we have checked the following:
1. Turn everything we can find off - the meter stopped going round.
2. Read the meter 3 times a day for 2 weeks - no obvious pattern or jumps noted
3. Check appliances with a plug in meter and nothing seem to have high consumption.
4. Paid for meter check - this has a second meter running in series to the house meter and shows the same usage +/-4kWh difference (not in our favour) over a fortnight.
5. Searched the house and attics for some hidden item such as a water tank but found nothing.

My questions are:
1. Is this high usage? Googling suggests 4,300kWh for a 5 bed house and asking others with similar houses our use is high.
2. Any thoughts on what could be using this much electricity?
3. What should I do next to find the cause for this?

I was able to switch to a fixed tariff at the end of July which is for a year so buys a bit of time for trying to investigate this.

Thank you for any wisdom!

 

Robin9

It may be as simple as big houses, and big stone built houses in Scotland, are expensive buildings to run.

On the energy saving side - limit those showers to 5 mins, install LED throughout

pochase

One thing here does not match up. In March (still a cold month) the average usage is 18KWh per day, that is 6570Kwh per year, with it even less with the 11KWh in August.

So the usage should be maybe 5000KWh or less. 

The 6KWh more in winter make some sense, convection oven and infrared heater add up quickly. 3 hours of use in total are the 6KWh.

What were your meter readings 12 months ago and totday?

MoreApples

We've done LED change over and showers aren't too long - but the showers don't account for using so much electricity, do they? It's standard electric showers not power showers.

Big stone houses is Scotland are expensive to heat but that's done with gas for us and we're now insulated as of this year so now rated C on the EPC. The house can't just guzzle electricity without an item using it. Plus I've compared with others with similar houses are we seem to have a higher usage.

MoreApples

pochase said:

One thing here does not match up. In March (still a cold month) the average usage is 18KWh per day, that is 6570Kwh per year, with it even less with the 11KWh in August.

So the usage should be maybe 5000KWh or less. 

The 6KWh more in winter make some sense, convection oven and infrared heater add up quickly. 3 hours of use in total are the 6KWh.

What were your meter readings 12 months ago and totday?

The 8396 figure is based on the readings from 31/7/21 and 31/7/22 - does that give you the information you need?

DE_612183

have you taken a reading now - so we can see the consumption during a hot summer?

Robin9

Big users - ones we've had on the forum recently  -  multiple pumps for ponds, multiple fridges and freezers.

The usual heating, showers, electric AGA's, 

Alnat1

You say you checked appliances, how long did you check for? I used a plug-in energy monitor on our 14 year old American FF for 48 hours and it was using 2.4kWh per day, it was quickly replaced with something much more efficient. It switches up and down in use so hard to check over a short time.

MoreApples

No ponds, no pumps, no Aga. The big fridge freezer does not use much when I checked it over 2 days with a plus in meter. I doubt the small fridge or freezer do either from doing a brief check on them.

The house is moderately big but our lifestyle is not.

matelodave

Do you really need to shower as often as you do and as Robin says, limit them to a couple of minutes rather than standing there for ten minutes or more. A 10kw electric shower will use 0.8kwhh in just five minutes, if three of you have a ten minute one every day then you are going to chew through 5kwh a day or nearly 2,000kwh a year. 

I can manage to shower in around two minutes (and that includes washing my hair) = 0.33kw, if you all did that you'd reduce it to 1kwh a day or 365 kwh a year. Shower every other day and you can halve that.

Using electric heating like an infra red heater or convector heater will just ramp up your consumption in the winter, perhaps you should get the gas central heating sorted out (assuming that you are on mains gas). 1kwh of gas cost about 25% of electricity, so you could be significantly better off using a shower thats fed from the gas central heating rather than using electric.

A smart meter or whole house energy monitor could help you pinpoint when you've got periods of high consumption. Try doing an overnight background check - read the meter before going to bed and then again in the morning before you ablute or have your morning cuppa - that will show you what you are using when you think everything is turned off. If its more than a couple of kwh over 8 hours then investigate what is still plugged in and using energy. Reading the meter every hours for a couple of days and noting what been used will also help you narrow it down. TBH even 2kwh over eight hours comes to 6kwh a day or 2,200kwh a year so you need to try an reduce it as much as possible.

Ours is around 1.5kwh over eight hours and that includes a Sky box, separate upright fridge and freezer, a router, optical terminal unit, three surveillance cameras and a few other odds & sods. Most other stuff is off at the wall.


What you think you use and what you actually use are often quite different, so you need to do a bit of sleuthing to find out where its all going. Overfilling kettles rather than just putting in enough Making sure that the washing machine, tumble dryer and dishwasher are full rather than partial loads will ensure that you are using them as efficiently as possible.

Dont leave stuff like PS4's in standby they can be quite power hungry and just shut stuff off at the wall when its not in use rather than leaving it on standby.

Saving a couple of watts here and there doesn't sound like much but just one watt on continuously is nearly 9kwh a year, if you can save 100watts a day you will save 900kwh which is worth around £250-£300 at the moment and possibly £600 come October.

MoreApples

I've done daily readings in the last 2 weeks - since the additional meter was installed to monitor the one we have. Our daily use on the last week averages 11kWh with a range from 8-18. I could not identify what caused the 18 day to have such high usage. I'd say most reading were 10-13 kWh/day.