How much energy do you use at home?

[Daox]

Originally Posted by Snax

I have to laugh at the optimism in the poll options. Seriously, how many of you have families of 5 or more and are using anywhere near or below 1000kWh/month?

Daox's utility bill tracking - EcoRenovator

Personally, I have 7 people in my household and I'm in the 300-500kWh range even in winter. Of course, I do have gas forced air and gas heated water. If I had electric heated water or heat I'm sure that would be blown out of the water. But, there is still a lot that I can and will be doing.

[PaleMelanesian]

My year-round average is just under 2,000 kwh / month. ALL electric. Texas summer, then it changes overnight to winter, then in March it changes overnight to summer again, with nothing in between. My house could use better insulation, too.

[Snax]

I think Daox is spot on here. There is a HUGE difference between all electric households and those that use gas. We are all electric here, and I actually made up a spreadsheet for the power draw of everything in our house down to the exact number and wattage of each light, and the reality is that lighting is a tiny fraction of our bill at about 200-250 kWh, and other small appliances including our fairly liberal use of the oven barely add another 200-250 kWh, which basically leaves the remainder to heating, cooling, and laundry, with the latter being the smallest slice of the three. Water heat however is without a doubt the largest part of the bill.

If we were to switch to gas, we would easily knock our electric use down to less than half if not a third.

[Ryland]

I'm really interested in seeing how sharply I can make my bills drop, it's hard of course to truly compare month to month without a year to look back on, but already we've been turning the thermostat down as low as 50F while not at home, plastic on a bunch of the windows and the rest of them soon, new entry doors in the end of February (old ones are ill fitting wood doors that feel cold all around them), water heater now has a timer on it turning it off at mid night and on again at 7am, but I'd like to get more tabs for it to turn it off from say 8am to 3pm as well, my logic on the times to have it turn off right before we might be using hot water and not needing it hot again for many hours, 50 gallons of hot water is plenty for a shower, so one room mate likes live music and showers at 1am after coming home, at 1am it will still be plenty hot but without the timer the water heater would click on at 1:30am and reheat that entire 50 gallons.

[groar]

Originally Posted by Ryland

I'm really interested in seeing how sharply I can make my bills drop, it's hard of course to truly compare month to month without a year to look back on,

We get a real bill only once a year. We pay 10 times a year based upon estimated bills. To optimize our consumption I began to look at my daily consumption.

I'm noting my daily consumption since end of September, every 3-5 days first, then daily since end of October. We have peak and off peak hours, so both values are noted. This permitted us to detect an error in the heating programmer With a simple spreadsheet I'm calculating a yearly forecast with the last 26 days before switching on the heating and the days since. We used 12MW last year, I'm forecasting a 10MW use this year ie a 16% saving At last real bill (beginning of December) they refunded us 750kWh.

We optimized our consumption in different ways :

• heat less : lower temperature.
• heat less bis : fewer hours. Stop the heating sooner as the cooling is slow (think pulse & glide ). Here we leave the home at 9AM so we stop the heating at 8AM.
• heat less ter : ceiling fan on winter position and lowest speed. I can't say how much it saves but the thermometer at head height displays 1°C less and we have less often a sensation of cold. This works as the thermostats are at the bottom at the radiators, ie half a feet high. We use the more silent fan when in house (the second is too noisy even if it's at the other side of the house) and both when nobody is at home.
• heat differently : if you have off peak then use that. Here off peak is up to 6:30AM so we start to heat at 6AM. Daily we use a little more energy but the total cost is lower.

The heat programmer manages 2 zones : living room & kitchen (in fact single room) and the other rooms. As these 2 zones have different temperatures and heat time, the doors are kept closed between these zones.

The water heater starts only when it receive the off peak signal

The dishwasher is used only during off peak hours, so we start it when we go to bed.

Finally I'm using a WattMeter to measure different consumptions. From that we changed our old fridge (500kWh/year saved) and I changed 2 computers (used 24x7) with 2 laptops (1.2MWh/year saved). We identified the next appliances on which we'll have the more saving. We have CFL since years and I calculated we are saving at least 75% of lighting bill, ie 440kWh/year.

This summer we didn't used our portable AC. We placed shades over the terrace and the two 2x4m (6x12ft) windows and of course used both ceiling fans in summer position and fastest speed.

Enough for tonight

Denis.

[james]

We are a family of 4 living off the grid. We don't have many panels and our batteries were free (not too many amp hrs!), so we use less than 50 KWH per month. We typically keep one CFL on in the evening hours, and sometimes have 2 or 3 on for various activities. We try to use our loads in the daytime when we have solar power to reduce the loss of power from putting the power into the batteries. We use a danby dtt 420 washer (which is 120V ac for those on the grid). It uses very little power. It is all manual so you decide the cycle length. We vary it based on how much power is available and how dirty the laundry is. It is a twin tub, so you have to move it from the agitation tub to the spin tub. We also use a 12 V radio which draws about 10 watts and the laptop which draws about 65 watts. We heat with wood, cook with wood in the winter, and heat 2/3 of our water with wood in the winter. At any given time we have 10 gallons of boiling water available on the cook stove. We have an on demand hot water heater, used only a little, for baths. This amounts to maybe 1 20 lb tank every month or month and half. We also run a small chest freezer, which I sometimes run as a freezer, sometimes as a fridge. We keep a cooler inside of the freezer storing all the food, which allows us to turn the freezer off all night and maintain frozen food. When I want to use the chest freezer as a fridge, I just turn it on for 10 minutes at the warmest thermostat setting in the morning and eve and keep the food in a cooler inside. During Nov dec and parts of Jan, we have to use a generator if we want to use the freezer. This uses maybe 3 or 4 gallons a month when the freezer is on. In the future we want to get a super efficient 12 V freezer, so we dont lose power to the inverter, and fill it up with food that we grow here so we dont have to drive to the store as often. Also new batteries and one more panel so we can get the generator use down to 1 gal/month or so.

[Snax]

Right now, my oldest is playing the Playstation2 on 27" TV, virtually every light in our downstairs is on, mostly thanks to our 4-year old, the refrigerator is currently running. I SWEAR I'M GOING TO PUT 15 MINUTE TIMERS ON EVERYTHING IN THIS HOUSE!!! Grrr . .

2600 kWh this last month.

Any takers on betting my garage lights actually got turned off at all during the day today?

[Ryland]

A timer on garage lights sound like a great idea, they would let you leave them on as you walk away with your arms full, or use a motion detector light switch, hey also tend to have a timer on them.

[Snax]

Well I actually tried the motion sensor switch in the garage, but I ran into a problem with the flourescent lighting. Unfortunately the cheaper motion activated switches don't like CFLs or whatever kind of balast I have in the 48" tube lights, so they end up ruining the flourescent tubes/CFLs. A switch rated for that type of use costs nearly $50.

So the question is, how long would it take for that investment to payback if the lights are left on an average of 4-8 hours per day and an average of 50-100W? That answer is: A long freakin' time at about 9 cents per kWh. Fortunately I think 4 hours may be on the high side of the real average, but it seems like they are on more than that. Maybe it's just me. :P

A simple push button 5-10-15-30 minute timer might make more sense. They seem to work pretty well for the bathroom fans during showers. Of course we are all in the habit of just pushing the 30 minute button though.

Regardless, it is still undeniable that our lighting use constitutes only 20-25% of our electrical use at worst. The majority of the rest comes from water and space heating.

[NachtRitter]

We typically are always over 1000KwH each month... usually between 900KwH and 1500KwH. Small house, but the ceiling boards are what hold up the tar&gravel roof... that is, there is absolutely no space for insulation between the living space and the roof. Freakin' hot in the summer and cold in the winter... thankfully the temperatures are fairly "reasonable" (110*F to 30*F range).

All electric except the furnace, since the place was built back when electric was the "right choice".

One day, the place will come down and a much more efficient home will be built in its place... one day...