What is a typical household?

RobM99

"My normal every day electric Is roughly just under  2700 kwh year or £21 a week"

Yes - at last - someone that speaks the language we all understand - pounds and pence!
I don't care if I use 3,500 kilojoules per cubic metre of 50% humidity air @ 20°C at 758mm Hg barometric pressure.

All I want to know - what's it going to cost?!

kuratowski

ab1234567890abcdefgh said:

14% of households do not, that's isn't very many.

14% of 28 million is just under 4 million households.  Yes, it's a minority, but not a small number!

[Deleted User]

RobM99 said:

"My normal every day electric Is roughly just under  2700 kwh year or £21 a week"

Yes - at last - someone that speaks the language we all understand - pounds and pence!
I don't care if I use 3,500 kilojoules per cubic metre of 50% humidity air @ 20°C at 758mm Hg barometric pressure.

All I want to know - what's it going to cost?!

It's far more useful comparing household usage in energy units rather than pounds.

If I said that my electric was £10 per month, you wouldn't know if it was because I am on a very cheap fixed deal or because I didn't use very much.

This thread is trying to help people understand a typical usage and there are plenty of other threads to choose from if you want to ask about unit prices.

RobM99

[Deleted User] said:

RobM99 said:

"My normal every day electric Is roughly just under  2700 kwh year or £21 a week"

Yes - at last - someone that speaks the language we all understand - pounds and pence!
I don't care if I use 3,500 kilojoules per cubic metre of 50% humidity air @ 20°C at 758mm Hg barometric pressure.

All I want to know - what's it going to cost?!

It's far more useful comparing household usage in energy units rather than pounds.

This thread is trying to help people understand a typical usage and there are plenty of other threads to choose from if you want to ask about unit prices.

Yep, fair point.

UncleDisco

We are a household of two adults (early retired in our 50s) living in a late 1980s small 3-bed house (c.85 sqm).  The property has modern double glazing and a gas combi boiler for heating and hot water.

The boiler flow temp is set to around 55 degrees and we have the heating timed to be 'on' for 13 hours per day from October to April.  The room-stat is located in the hallway (unheated) and set to 17 degrees - at this, the lounge easily achieves a comfortable 21 degrees whilst the kitchen/diner, bathroom and bedrooms all achieve at least 18 degrees.  This set-up suits us well.

We have an electric fan oven, gas hob, and a modern size standard fridge-freezer along with a dishwasher (used daily) and combined washer/dryer (dryer seldom used!).  We have a 50 inch smart LED tv along with a SkyQ box and home cinema system - all of which is effectively left on 'standby' when not in use.  All of our lighting is from LED bulbs.  

We don't have an electric car or any other hungry 'outliers', but do use a 120w electric towel-rail in the bathroom which runs for 7 hours per day.      

Overall I would say that whilst we've always been fairly "aware" of our energy usage, we were getting really worried about where prices might have ended up in 2023/4 without the recently announced government price controls - so much in fact that we had already started to scale back on future spending plans....not good for the wider economy!   

Reflecting on this, I find it interesting that our response to the energy crisis was to cut back on 'other' spending (the things that we retired early for) rather than to deliberately reduce our consumption and/or invest in 'greener' systems....I really do wonder where the tipping point on energy prices would be for us ?       

Anyway, 'typical' or not, we consume around 3,000 kwh of Electricity and around 8,000 kwh of Gas per year.  

At April 2022 prices (Loyal Octopus Variable / West Midlands / DD) the cost was £145 pcm and we are expecting this to increase to somewhere in the region of £180 pcm from October under the new mechanism (excluding the additional £400 govt subsidy).

I hope that this ramble helps someone somewhere...!        

Miser1964

UncleDisco said:

Anyway, 'typical' or not, we consume around 3,000 kwh of Electricity and around 8,000 kwh of Gas per year.  

From what you state, there's a least half-a-dozen simple ways to reduce your consumption

UncleDisco

Miser1964 said: 

From what you state, there's a least half-a-dozen simple ways to reduce your consumption

Yes, I agree that there are things that we could do to reduce our consumption.  However, implementing them (or not) is a personal decision /choice for households to make unless they're overwhelmed by the price of their existing consumption.

In the context of this thread my thought was that perhaps households at or below 'typical' consumption may choose to cut back on other things first....and if so, what price to energy have to be to tip the equation?

For our household, it looked likely to be the previous January 2023 cap, but isn't now under the revised October 'guarantee'.....   

Miser1964

IMHO the Jan 2023 kWh rates Ofgem were postulating would have guaranteed civil unrest/mass non-payment and any govt. would have had to intervene. 

The challenge, now that we're borrowing £150B to limit the bills for two years, is to get a coherent policy and action plan for energy security in Britain for decades to come. 

I doubt that people will meekly accept the ban on gas boilers proposed for 2025 or the ban on petrol cars a few years later, now they realise that 'net zero' means pauperisation. 

Nebulous2

We're in a Georgian property, which is a listed building - so we are limited in what we are allowed to do.  3 bedrooms, fairly large rooms.  Modern combi boiler, electric shower, 3 adults, house permanently occupied.  North- East of Scotland, so colder than most of you. Gas 18000 kwh per year and electric 4300 kwh. 

Most usage is loaded to winter. 

Very fortunately we took a gamble in October and fixed for 2 years. Although prices had begun to go up, and were a big increase on our previous bill, they were much better than current prices.   Our direct debit is set at £160 a month and we are currently £300 in credit. It looks likely we will be £400 better off in the next year than last. We will however work on trimming our usage. 

theoretica

I just looked it up and find it interesting that the proportion of households that are single person range between about 1/4 in London to 1/3 in Scotland.  Of course if 2/3 of *households* have 2 or more people living there, then at least 4/5ths of *people* will live in a household with 2 or more people - probably considerably more than 4/5ths as many households have more than 2 people.

What this means to me is that if energy use has some correlation with household size, then single person households will bring the median (and mean) energy use *by household* down - but mean that this median won't necessarily match personal observations of energy use as more people will speak for each multi-person household.

For what it is worth, as a single person household I used about 1100kW electricity and 5000kW gas in the last 12 months.