What's your energy usage?

[boy wrangler]

The guys from the QLD Gov ClimateSmart Home Service just finished at our place and our energy usage through the day (no lights, no tv etc etc) costs us 3c per hour or 0.199kw per hour. This is just our basic usage, not including the pump for the water or any appliances that don't run all the time like tvs, dishwashers, lights, oven, computer etc.

I'm not sure what the average is, but I'm pretty pleased!

So who can give me some perspective? Is this good or not? Am I living in lala land? :2lol

[michelle_j_r]

i'm not sure how i would measure what my background usage is. But i imagine you just mean fridge, clocks.... um.... and whatever else.... i don't think i could test that myself.

but for my complete usage my average is
summer 12.17kW a day
autumn 14.66kW a day
winter 17.89kW a day

I think the biggest increase in power usage over winter for me is that i need to leave the hot water service on for most of the day to keep the water heated. In summer i only had the service on for about 3hours in the afternoon and it stayed hot enough the rest of the day. No chance of that over winter.

[marmee]

Looking at my bill and breaking it down per day, for Winter I used 19.7 kWh a day.

I have not long been on the phone to my electricity company about off peak and peak times for using electricity. Apparently I am not on a time monitored system - it is all peak.

I am trying to work out if I should go to a timed system now, given that on the one I am currently on, it is about 18c a kWh but on the times system, it is something like 34c in peak, 18c in mid and 8 c in low....just got to work it all out...

[jodiemiller]

We're still waiting for our quarterly bill to arrive and tell us our consumption - offset by the extra solar panels we just added.

[Bron]

i'm feeling pretty good then, our last bill was 9Kwh :)

[DePome]

Ours ticks over at 0 cents somehow, even when the fridge/freezer kicks in. The most it seems to get to without a kitchen appliance being in use, or the HWS, is 4 cents. We were careful to buy a fridge/freezer that uses less power than average though (different to the star rating...). Somehow we still use 9-12 kWh per day for normal electricity (the highest being over winter when we have to put a pedestal fan on our stupid wood heater and a portable heater in the study with me) and around 6-8 kWh for our small HWS that has to be set at a high temp to avoid us running out of hot water :-(

[marmee]

9kWh a day, Bron? Wow. What am I doing wrong here? Pool??? Stupid plasma TV??

[michelle_j_r]

yeah, nice! cos that would have been over winter, too, i imagine?
I am not sure if i could get ours much under 12kWh..... although i hope to get my house insulated after xmas so that will help my winter bill....

i reckon a pool would chug a bit of power, Marmee.

[Lee]

I remember when we first moved into this house and we we didn't have much money and we did the adventurous frugality kind of thing, our electricity usage was 4kW a day. I can't even imagine being able to convince DH to go back to that these days LOL, although I'm sure I could. I don't know what it is now though. I'll have a look at the latest bill later today if I remember.

[Joey]

According to my latest bill my average daily use is 5.9 kwh, which sounds pretty amazing - but I have gas hot water & cooking so not that amazing. I have an old second hand fridge but a pretty good washing machine and no dryer or plasma tv or any of that stuff. Oh and a little girl who needs a light on all night to sleep

[Bron]

we don't have a pool and no idea what sort of tv we have. we do have gas cooktop (electric stove tho) and solar hot water :)