Is My Electric Energy Usage Way Too High?

TractorFactor

Seems we use 4118 kWh per year.
I read the average is half that.

We lived in a house that had central heating but in the Office room, some modern but electric heaters.  They went on a bit throughout last year but not every day.  I wouldn't say we waste electric, we have LED bulbs everywhere, turn things off when not in use, although the TV would have been on most days, nearly all day.

284 Jan-Feb
285 Feb-Mar
321 Mar-Mar
249 Mar-Mar
266 Mar-Apr
255 Apr-May
259 May-Jun
256 Jun-Jul
212 Jul-Aug
268 Aug-Sept
308 Sept-Oct
384 Oct-Nov
377 Nov-Dec
394 Dec-Jan

Something went wrong with the billing so the March-March is 07-19 March and 20-28 March.  Find it difficult to believe we spent 500kWh in March...

Most of this was on the Octopus Tracker, so unless I'm reading the bills wrong?
I've taken the "Energy Used" section - this is from Nov-Dec:



This won't include gas.
Our direct debit is £160 a month. So far, we haven't gone less than £100 in credit. 

I also appreciate it depends what sort of household I run. But please try and advise with the info I have provided. I'm not in the habit of sharing tiny details.

I should also add, our tumble dryer is used year round (or was last year) but that'll go down as we utilise ye old sunshine for drying things this year.
It's a modern heat exchanger one though, supposedly the best / cheapest to run.

Newbie_John

Ignore all the things that don't produce heat, take into consideration washing machine, tumble drier, cooking, hot water etc. number of people, size of the house.. - and these can vary a lot among households.

In my opinion your bill is low - so not sure where you got average from?

And the heaters have not much impact, only 30% more in winter months then summer months.

We have electric only house and summer months are similar to yours but winter ones go up from 200kWh to 1200kWh.

Spoonie_Turtle

Heating/cooling uses far more electricity than light or motion (e.g. motors for the spin cycle of the washing machine).  That would be borne out by the increase in autumn-winter.

Other electricity-heavy appliances include tumble dryer, washing machine to an extent (heating the water, mostly), dishwasher, electric shower, pond pump?, oven if electric, old inefficient fridges and freezers.

[I have no frame of reference for what's 'normal' for a family home with gas heating, as our own base load is heavy because of freezers, then plus electric shower on top (we have no choice) means we're relatively heavy users even before we add in the heating and our heat pump's vampire load.]

Badboi

Ours for 2024 is about 4000 units. We run 2 heated fish tanks and a pond pump, but have gch, and it hasn’t varied that much year to year even when the kids lived here , the average is simply that, some use more some use less, there’s no right or wrong amount 

Reed_Richards

Newbie_John said:

Ignore all the things that don't produce heat, take into consideration washing machine, tumble drier, cooking, hot water etc. number of people, size of the house.. - and these can vary a lot among households.

Don't forget the fridge and freezer.  Neither might consume a lot of power but they are on 24/7 so a less efficient one that consumes an extra 100 W will add 2.4 kWh per day to your total consumption.  And that's in the context of your total, which amounts to an average of 11.3 kWh per day.  Before I went all-eclectic, my average was about 8 kWh per day so 11.3 really doesn't seem too bad at all.

TroubledTarts

Realistically it's only too high if it is causing you issues with paying bills.

Otherwise reducing usage down might mean a change in lifestyle and comfort levels.

Comparing to others is largely fruitless as we don't all have the same patterns in life or exactly the same appliances and usage schedules.

It can all be explained with how much time people are home, their usage and what appliances you use but to go into that much depth you need to give a lot more information if you want to know where you use that energy and how you can reduce it.

TractorFactor

Newbie_John said:

Ignore all the things that don't produce heat, take into consideration washing machine, tumble drier, cooking, hot water etc. number of people, size of the house.. - and these can vary a lot among households.

In my opinion your bill is low - so not sure where you got average from?

And the heaters have not much impact, only 30% more in winter months then summer months.

We have electric only house and summer months are similar to yours but winter ones go up from 200kWh to 1200kWh.

Really appreciate your comments.

I think it's ofgem that say average for the year is around 2100 kWh but I wonder when that was updated?

While people may be switching to air fryers and LED bulbs, they're also bringing in smart speakers and the amount of lights I see outside people's houses all the time these days is growing.

Bigphil1474

We use around 2700 kwH a year in a 4 bed semi (only lived here 8 months but it's a fairly accurate prediction based on usage so far). We have a chest freezer in the shed, fridge/freezer and a separate under counter  fridge in the kitchen, on 24/7, electric oven although we have reduced usage due to more air frying, but gas central heating. I do have a small plug in electric heater in my office that I have on to keep the temp. up during the coldest days. We have a dishwasher but only use it about once a week. No tumble dryer. We were paying £85 a month for electric but just switched tariff and we were in credit so gonna be paying £65 a month going forward. We are quite careful with electric and gas usage.

I'd say your electric usage is only slightly higher in the summer than ours is - we were using around 7kwh per day in the first couple of months living here, but yours is a lot higher than ours in the winter - we were using around 9kwh a day in December - not sure there's much more for us to use between summer and winter other than a few more lights and my little heater? There's only 2 of us though.

Qyburn

TractorFactor said:

I think it's ofgem that say average for the year is around 2100 kWh but I wonder when that was updated?

As far as I can see Ofgem's "Typical Domestic Consumption Values (TDCVs)" were updated in 2023 but not since then.  The value used for price cap illustrations is 2,700 kWh which is supposed to be the median. In other words half of the UK's households use more, half use less. 

Dandytf

I want to add my example though constantly home 99%
Electric only DQ Storage +2 Panel Heaters.
Jan -last of winter 721kwh
Feb -568 lower
March excluding last few days 493kwh -Lower 
SP DD fixed though does mostly reduce at SP’s discretion.
Currently 133.16
Is it time to switch off DQ Storage heater (Eco7)
Only been using Bedroom Panel 1-2hrs though too early for off peak times.
Haven’t noticed much difference with combi boiler.

thanks

matelodave

Not many years ago the "average" electricity consumption was well over 3000kwh a year but since the introduction of energy saving lightbulbs, energy efficient appliance and the significant increases in the cost of energy most people have managed to use a bit less than they used to.

However as @Qyburn suggest,s the average is just that, so by definition half the people will use less and half will use more.

I'm a "use more" person as we are all electric and those with solar panels will use a lot less but we all get lumped into the average to produce what is essentially a meaningless number which gets use to calculate the price cap. Its therefore nigh on impossible to try and compare your consumption with someone else.

In fact all you can do is find out what is using it and when, so you can put some effort into turning stuff down or off