How much electricity consumption is too much? Is my home OTT?

QrizB

Looking at your half-hourly usage, you've got about 200Wh per 30-minute interval - 400W, about 10kWh a day - of base load. That's thing like your fridges and freezers that run all the time, and it's 2/3 of your total consumption.

Most "normal" households run a base load of less than 200W (5kWh/day), and the careful folks on this forum generally aim to get it below 100W (2.5kWh/day).

If you can find out where that's all going and reduce it, you might be able to make a big dent in your annual usage.

lohr500

You could try switching off all the freezers and fridges for say 5 or 6 hours and then back on. 
Then review your half hourly graphs again to see what impact it made.
If you don't open the fridge/freezer doors during the period without power, I don't think the contents will come to much harm. Especially if they aren't in a warm room, given the ambient temperatures at the moment. 

On-the-coast

HorseWhisperer said:

On-the-coast said:

Gas CH here.  (But hot water for sink & showers from immersion heater)

Largish 4/5 bedroom. 7500 kWh/yr
plus another 3000 for EV charging.  

Interesting you say you use an immersion for hot water as I was wondering if the imersion on our oil-fired hot water tank is maybe kicking in too much, though it is switched off. Makes me feel a bit better knowing someone else uses more than us, though I feel for you and your electricity bill! Do you have any solar/battery installed to help offset it? Many thanks for responding.

No solar / battery. Roof doesn’t really suit an installation.  Have considered an ASHP as that would save money (and add a few 1000 more kWh!), but house plumbing is too old to make that easy. 
4 people in the house, 3 different working shifts, so cooking at odd hours.  2 mostly wfh. (And a heated vivarium - snake)
ultimately I’m not short of money so we haven’t economised as much as we should, but it would be quite hard for us to drop below 6000kwh

HorseWhisperer

lohr500 said:

You could try switching off all the freezers and fridges for say 5 or 6 hours and then back on. 
Then review your half hourly graphs again to see what impact it made.
If you don't open the fridge/freezer doors during the period without power, I don't think the contents will come to much harm. Especially if they aren't in a warm room, given the ambient temperatures at the moment. 

Good tip, though not sure I want to risk turning off freezers as they are loaded with home grown meat. It would be interesting to find out how much energy they need to get back up to -18 after 5 hours though. Maybe I will move all meat out of one of the freezers and leave only veg suff in there, then test it and see. Thanks!

Alnat1

We had a similar problem a few years ago and used the Tapo to test our fridges and freezers. We found our oldish American style fridge freezer was using almost a third of our annual electricity total!

It did make us rethink our chiller use as a whole. We realised we were spending more by storing "cheap" items for a long time than it would cost us to buy them fresh when we needed them. Kitchen fridge freezer has remained but the American monster has gone and so has the large chest freezer. These were replaced with a small fridge freezer in the garage after we had eaten our way through the mountain of food we had stored. There was definitely stuff in there we had totally forgotten about.

I realise you're running a farm/smallholding but if you are storing more than you can ever use you maybe should consider selling it fresh or producing less in future.

Scot_39

HorseWhisperer said:

lohr500 said:

You could try switching off all the freezers and fridges for say 5 or 6 hours and then back on. 
Then review your half hourly graphs again to see what impact it made.
If you don't open the fridge/freezer doors during the period without power, I don't think the contents will come to much harm. Especially if they aren't in a warm room, given the ambient temperatures at the moment. 

Good tip, though not sure I want to risk turning off freezers as they are loaded with home grown meat. It would be interesting to find out how much energy they need to get back up to -18 after 5 hours though. Maybe I will move all meat out of one of the freezers and leave only veg suff in there, then test it and see. Thanks!

If I home freeze something from the supermarket I am normally told by packet instructions to use it within 1 month.

Only stuff supplied frozen has long dates.

Never really understood the distinction.

Qyburn

We use around 3,600 kWh a year. Two people in a four bedroom farmhouse. Various "things" running in the outbuildings like battery charging, dehumidifier in the workshop, electric fence energiser. Our freezer (just one) uses around 0.6kWh per day. 

The fence energiser fires at about 3/4 second intervals and draws 150mA at 12V (1.8W). No idea on efficiency from 240V but even if that's only 50% it's less than 0.1kWh per day.  It's 2J from memory. I can't monitor it with a Tapo as there's no Internet in that shed.

Have looked into solar panels on the outbuildings? We have 20 on a SSW facing barn, these will generate enough to pay for all our electricity.

HorseWhisperer

Qyburn said:

We use around 3,600 kWh a year. Two people in a four bedroom farmhouse. Various "things" running in the outbuildings like battery charging, dehumidifier in the workshop, electric fence energiser. Our freezer (just one) uses around 0.6kWh per day. 

The fence energiser fires at about 3/4 second intervals and draws 150mA at 12V (1.8W). No idea on efficiency from 240V but even if that's only 50% it's less than 0.1kWh per day.  It's 2J from memory. I can't monitor it with a Tapo as there's no Internet in that shed.

Have looked into solar panels on the outbuildings? We have 20 on a SSW facing barn, these will generate enough to pay for all our electricity.

A fellow smallholder? We'll look into the Tapo, so thanks for the tip. Our plan is to cover our 3 bay, SW facing  garage roof with solar panels (will take at least 20, if not more). Do you have a battery to get you through winter or do you just sell back to the grid in the summer to balance our paying the grid in winter? I have another post on the Heat Pump thread about the merits of just having a battery with no solar panels once we get a heat pump installed. A kind respondent worked out that financially that the payback of feed-in tariffs currently would pay for all our annual electricity consumption that number of panels would generate, so not to bother spending another £7k on a battery. Food for thought!

QrizB

HorseWhisperer said:

Our plan is to cover our 3 bay, SW facing  garage roof with solar panels (will take at least 20, if not more).

Per your other thread, 20 panels is ~10kW and should cost no more than £9k (ideally less).

When you said you'd have to spend £14k, I'd assumed that you had space for roughly double that.

Qyburn

HorseWhisperer said:.

.. Do you have a battery to get you through winter or do you just sell back to the grid in the summer to balance our paying the grid in winter?

We do have a battery, I think it's impossible to be sure it makes financial sense as you'd really need 12 month data with and without to be sure.  We have 8.5kW of panels and 6kW inverter (maximum allowed by SSEN) so on good days the battery charges from surplus which would otherwise simply be lost.

During Winter the plan is to charge or part change from off peak at 8.5p which would cover most of our use even if there was no generation at all. Theoretically it would make financial sense to fully disharge the battery early evening, before recharging in the small hours but that doesn't seem quite ethical.

In the event we couldn't do any of that Winter 24/25 as were stuck waiting for Octopus to fix our meter. Even so the credit from Summer still covered Winter use until it started making surplus again in March.