How much electric does your house use when you are away?

Mstty

jr5678 said:

This is a puzzle for me too. We went on holiday and still used around 5kWh each day. How?! So for the week shown below we used 38.55kWh. SC of £0.3998 = £2.80 per week plus 38.55 x £0.2668 = £13.09. That’s roughly £52 a month without even being there!

I’ve bought an energy monitoring smart plug to try and figure this all out to see what we can turn off. 

Check your 24 hourly usage for any blips and then think immersion etc or is the hourly graph constant load?

myhooose

With an energy monitor I recorded the following phantom power usage. I've since made some changes to reduce it.

SuzeQStan

Just did an experiment to get our background as close to 0w as possible - turned off all electrical items including standby  FF, boiler, all teles, leccy chairs, router, lamps, etc EVERYTHING and we could not get it to go below 40w on the IHD. 

Then discovered we had a Monsoon MEV ventilation system up in the loft running 24/7 (inherited from previous owner) and found that it was on approx 30w per hr day in day out. It doesn’t sound like much but it’s quite a lot for something running constantly reckon about £65 a year at current rates. 

In the end we managed to get our background down to 9w by switching the ventilation system off and had to admit defeat at that point!  We think that the 7 x mains smoke alarms are mainly to account for those background 9w. 

Oh and we have left the ventilation system off (all other electrical items back to where they were before the experiment)- going to replace current MEV with a system that we can control/turn off and on. It will hopefully pay for itself after one year.

Analyst1234

Our phantom load (lowest hour of the day/night with least usage) is 1.32kWh/hr at 4am in the morning. Am I being thick but compared to SuzeQstan saying the they are down to 40w/hr. Are we really 33 times more power hungry when as sleep and all switched off? 

MWT

Analyst1234 said:

Our phantom load (lowest hour of the day/night with least usage) is 1.32kWh/hr at 4am in the morning. Am I being thick but compared to SuzeQstan saying the they are down to 40w/hr. Are we really 33 times more power hungry when as sleep and all switched off? 

If your consumption in your lowest hour is 1.32kWh (note: not kWh/h) then you must have a huge daily total.

How much do you actually use a day, and are you using night storage heaters, or some other form of electric heating?

ariarnia

when we were in london recently the bright app is reporting about 1.9 kw and 0 gas for the whole days we were away. looking back to when we were away for a night earlier in the year it was closer to 2.1 kw for the day so i'm guessing that's the fridge and freezer having to work harder in hot weather. 

wild666

Alnat1 said:

@dunstonh Well done you, the standby costs really can make a big difference.

Good luck with your quest to 10kWh.

I've dropped my daily usage down from over 6 kWh per day to just 3.6 kWh per day by turning off everything that's not in standby mode except the fridge, freezer and router. 

piperm87

Got mine down to around 16 / 18kwh per day... that's with using around 9 / 10kwh charging my PHEV. The lowest i've gotten over past month is 7kwh on 3 occasions. All i have running in background is FF, Router, Swann CCTV set up and boiler on standby

when i go to bed of a night the live usage screen on the IHD is usually running at around 70W thats with the above (so long as the fridge isn't running) and my lads 3W night light on in his bedroom and 5W landing light on..

wild666

Malkytheheed said:

A lot of smugness from people who only use 3kw/h a day in normal usage. Sorry but I don't want to live like that. I want to actually enjoy my life a little. Also why is it by defacto "bad" to use more energy? Im in Scotland, 99% of the actual electricity sent to homes here comes from wind turbines so there is no need to be pious about using less. I don't want to live like a caveman. 

Nothing smug about reducing usage to 3 kWh per day. I use electric when needed and my usage is averaging 3.6 to 4 kWh per day with the odd 6 kWh day thrown in when I do laundry.
My grandmother used to use less than 1 kWh per day but then the prices were very low compared to today's price. The only appliances left on 24/7 were the fridge and freezer and they used very little electric and her TV was on for no more than 1 hour per day and never left in standby mode, when it was turned off it was at the wall socket and unplugged.

ariarnia

Malkytheheed said:

A lot of smugness from people who only use 3kw/h a day in normal usage. Sorry but I don't want to live like that. I want to actually enjoy my life a little. Also why is it by defacto "bad" to use more energy? Im in Scotland, 99% of the actual electricity sent to homes here comes from wind turbines so there is no need to be pious about using less. I don't want to live like a caveman. 

i don't think it's about being smug stating that our annual average daily use is about half the 'average' for the uk. that's just a fact. we are lucky enough to have a well insulated home and to have hobbies that mean we're either out of the house or not using electric most of the time (crafts and sports). you might be amazed to learn that our lives are very comfortable and not at all like cave men. admittedly we don't stare at screens for hours every evening and don't think it's a hardship or chore to turn things off an on as we need them. 

there is absolutely no problem with you using more electric than we do. you can use as much as you want and as suits your lifestyle. as long as you can afford it... if you cant afford it or whant to cut down then you can talk to those of us who already use less.