Energy use

[science_fox]

I'm usually not that bothered. We recently (sometime about a year ago) had a smart meter fitted, which radios a small display showing useage. It remains pretty constant week on week (if I remember to look) with, obviously, more gas use over cold times for heating.

We were away for a week's hol. I expected to return to a reading essentially 0 with just a tickover for a few items not turned off. Somewhat surprised to see a reading approx 1/2 of usual amount.

It makes sense that things which are continuously on, even at low powers, use a lot more elec than you expect cf to a sudden but short burst like a kettle. However I was very surprised at just how large this was. Is it me just being rubbish at estimating power levels, or have I got a truly inefficient device somewhere?

[bob sterman]

Is it me just being rubbish at estimating power levels, or have I got a truly inefficient device somewhere?

Or some wiring shared with a neighbour???

[Opti]

Some Fridges/Freezers use a non-negligible amount of electricity.

[rockdoctor]

Here’s my daily use (terraced house, family of five). Baseload is about 400W, which includes loads of things on standby, numerous ethernet switches and wifi repeaters, four security cameras, fridge & freezer. You can see that baseload dominates the area under the line.
If I go away and switch of lots of optional things I can probably get baseload down to 200W

146B723E-AA03-4EF3-850A-A841E3C88720.jpeg (48.68 KiB) Viewed 1317 times

[basementer]

Did you leave the immersion heater running? In my current place, with hot water on demand from an LPG system, the combined electricity and gas bills have been much, much lower than in the last one, which had a (modern, insulated) cylinder heated electrically.

[Bird on a Fire]

Seems odd. I was away from home all of January and most of August this year, and here's how much my fridge-freezer (purchased 2019, rating A iirc) uses:

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Did you actually turn off and unplug everything you weren't using? Standby can use quite a lot.

[Martin Y]

Worth noting that for about a decade now, EU regulation* means new televisions, computers, microwaves etc can't use more than half a watt in standby. So wherever your home's base power level is, they'll barely figure.

*From whose shackles we are presumably now of course free to be as wasteful as we please. Hooray.

[headshot]

Our gas bill recently leapt up to 7 times the amount of our normal summer month usage so I checked out our usage on Octopus’s excellent app and notice that we the meter was saying that we had been using up to 4-5 cubic metres of gas per day whilst we were away with the heating and hot water switched off (we only have a gas boiler).

I switched off the mains gas supply overnight and the meter registered 2 cubic metres whilst the gas was off.

I’ve had a number of conversations and emails with Octopus and we’re getting new meters fitted at the end of the month.

It’s always worth checking your meters aren’t borked.

[nekomatic]

Data from the couple of weeks we were away on holiday last month shows our house uses about 170 W base load, or 4 kWh a day - that’ll mostly be a medium chest freezer and an under counter fridge. Computers and so on left asleep or in standby, nothing specially switched off that I remember.

[Bird on a Fire]

Sounds like my strategy of unplugging stuff is paying dividends, then.

[Millennie Al]

Is it me just being rubbish at estimating power levels, or have I got a truly inefficient device somewhere?

It's probably worth measuring. There are two easy ways - one crude and one more accurate. For the crude method, switch off everything (including things like fridges which can be off for an hour or two if you don't open them). Then check your meter to see if the usage drops to zero. If not, go on a hunt for anything still on. If you can't find it, there may be a meter fault or some hidden device you need to locate. To be more accurate, get a meter like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Electricity-Mo ... IWDMI9RAON - not necssarily that one as I just picked it as a cheap example and have not used it myself. The you can measure how much your fridge/freezer uses over several days. And hoe much th ewashing machine uses for a load. And how much anything on standby really uses. This should give a good idea of where savings can be made (e.g. recommendations about washing machine programmes are usually wildly inaccurate with modern models as they vary their usage depending on the load).

[purplehaze]

It's called the standing charge.

Mine is currently, 55p per day for electric and 25p per day for gas. The latter is on a fixed rate until end of March 23, but the standing charge will also increase after this.

Standing charges are immoral.

[Bird on a Fire]

Surely the standing charge is measured in £, rather than kWh which I assume is what science fox is reporting?

[IvanV]

Deleted. Someone already said it.

[Martin_B]

It's called the standing charge.

Mine is currently, 55p per day for electric and 25p per day for gas. The latter is on a fixed rate until end of March 23, but the standing charge will also increase after this.

Standing charges are immoral.

Slightly off topic, but water bills in Australia are insane for this. My "standing charge" (having a water and sewerage connection) is 92.5% of my water bill. Actual water usage is only 7.5% of the bill, so there's little incentive to save water. Similarly, if electricity companies increase standing charges it dilutes any effect of trying to save energy.

[Bird on a Fire]

Pretty helpful breakdown of (presumably average/rough) costs of using various appliances, from Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... rgy-crisis

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h/t https://twitter.com/EllenAMilligan/stat ... 6220936192

[WFJ]

It's called the standing charge.

Mine is currently, 55p per day for electric and 25p per day for gas. The latter is on a fixed rate until end of March 23, but the standing charge will also increase after this.

Standing charges are immoral.

Slightly off topic, but water bills in Australia are insane for this. My "standing charge" (having a water and sewerage connection) is 92.5% of my water bill. Actual water usage is only 7.5% of the bill, so there's little incentive to save water. Similarly, if electricity companies increase standing charges it dilutes any effect of trying to save energy.

In places with plenty of water, standing charges of 100% are normal. Every place I've ever lived has been like this.

[Millennie Al]

Standing charges are immoral.

What's wrong with standing charges? The infrastructure has a cost which is independent of usage.

[science_fox]

Surely the standing charge is measured in £, rather than kWh which I assume is what science fox is reporting?

To be honest I don't know if the smart meter readout incorporates the standing charge or not... you'd assume not but it should be possible to do so.

Ooh - maybe it was the immersion. I'll have a bit of a check and see. If it's the meters I'll by grumpy as they're both new (ish within a couple of years).

Thanks for the info it's not just me.

[philbo]

Our gas bill recently leapt up to 7 times the amount of our normal summer month usage so I checked out our usage on Octopus’s excellent app and notice that we the meter was saying that we had been using up to 4-5 cubic metres of gas per day whilst we were away with the heating and hot water switched off (we only have a gas boiler).

I switched off the mains gas supply overnight and the meter registered 2 cubic metres whilst the gas was off.

I’ve had a number of conversations and emails with Octopus and we’re getting new meters fitted at the end of the month.

It’s always worth checking your meters aren’t borked.

Not energy.. but: our water bill came in astronomical. We assumed it was down to the huge flooding they caused while replacing a water main (our meter's by the road), but Thames Water continued to insist we were using about half a dozen baths a day sort of amounts (a bit over £2k per year)

When we (finally, a couple of years down the line due to Covid, and only after turning off the direct debit because they wanted to raise it to silly money) got someone out to check, it turns out that since about 1990 our meter & our neighbour's (a farm, though not a working one so not sure where all the water's going) have been swapped around.

I guess this is less likely as most electricity meters sit inside the house, but it's also worth checking meter serial numbers, just in case

[headshot]

Our increase almost precisely dates to when they back-engineered a way to make the 1st Gen smart meter send reading directly to the supplier. So I think it’s just borked - also confirmed by the fact that the supply tap and meter are directly beside one another under the stairs and the meter still records use when the tap is off.

The fun part is that they’ll still charge us for the usage and then correct the bill once the new meters have been fitted and have been active for a month or so. I look forward to that inevitable shitshow of fuckery.