# Power usage?



## William (May 29, 2015)

How much power do you use at home?

We heat with remote heat, so power usage is only PCs and water - In 7 months around 7700kWH for a total of 1227,17EUR or roughly 180EUR monthly.


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## Flapadar (May 29, 2015)

£30 gas, £40 electric a month.


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## drmike (May 29, 2015)

William said:


> How much power do you use at home?
> 
> We heat with remote heat, so power usage is only PCs and water - In 7 months around 7700kWH for a total of 1227,17EUR or roughly 180EUR monthly.


In 7 months you used 7700kWH?  1100 per month then?    

Power here is odd.   We have electric - multiple services.  In addition to computers, office equipment, etc. we use electric for heating loads.  Namely we heat water with electric and during the winter we supplement  air heating with electric.  Plus biomass stoves we run  use electric for augers to feed fire and for blowers to move the air.

I need to pull bills to see totals.   I know it's north of $500 a month in the dead of winter.  Much less in the warmer months ($125 USD). All said it's too much but it's a very large space with lots of folks.

Long term plan is to move to other heating methods preferably wood and coal to offset costs.  Those store better and can stockpile such proactively with better price points. Also a geothermal heating system is on the improvement list.


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## William (May 29, 2015)

> In 7 months you used 7700kWH?  1100 per month then?


Yep, around 1100 per month - Probably more now as we did not have much hardware when we moved in for the first months.


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## clarity (May 29, 2015)

My place is all electric, and I spend around $25/month. That is an average of around 300kWh. I am rarely there, and I keep everything as efficient as possible.


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## pcan (May 30, 2015)

My current annual electric power usage is 1718 KWh; monthly average is between 120 Kw (winter) and 200 Kw (summer - due to AC and increased use of the washing machine). The apartment has been built in 1993 and I got a tax bonus in 2010-2011 to refurbish it with energy efficient

technologies. I will recover up to 55% of the cost as income tax deductions, on the next 10 years;t The market value of the house also increased.

There is a 5cm thick additional insulation layer on the outside of all perimetral walls and on the top ceiling.

All Windows glass is double pane.

A condensing boiler (natural gas powered) provides central heating and hot water.

The ducted air conditioner is a high-efficiency Mitsubishi inverter (made in Japan), I turn it on in july-august to reduce the heat but I don't use it as heating unit because the condensing boiler has a higher efficiency. It only draws 1.8 Kw, so I can use it on my 3 KW standard residential power supply and still have one major appliance running at the same time.

Refrigerator and fridge are separate units, so each one is optimized for the task and efficiency is higher. Both are smaller than normal, because there is a supermarket in walking distance and I don't need to stockpile; this also helps avoiding overeating. It was difficult to find a refrigerator and a freezer so small, and they cost more than regular size units, but they draw very little power.

Lighting is LED and fluorescent.

And... the power hungry home servers are off and kept in storage, replaced by a single low-power HP microserver (turned off when I don't need it) and several cheap VPS and dedicated, rented as needed. Due to my job, I could grab almost for free and run at home heaps of 7-8 years old retired servers, and I was doing so years ago. It became clear that this was not a productive use of time, space and electric power.


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## MannDude (May 30, 2015)

Couldn't find the most recent bill, but this is from earlier this year:

$308.07 for 2945kwh

Feb 18-Mar 19

In the summer time it's significantly less. My window AC unit is MUCH cheaper to operate than my electric furnace to heat the house. In the summer I only have to drop the temp inside 10-20 degrees... in the winter, I need to raise it sometimes 70 degrees or more...

I'm looking forward to going back to $100~ electric bills.

This old house was built in the 1870's and is super inefficient as far as heating/cooling goes. Single pane windows, cracks between doors and door frames that allow heating/cooling to be sucked out and just an old rickety house in general.

EDIT:



You can see the major difference in cost between summer and winter electrical costs. Since I live/work at home I'm always here and the PC is on most the time but I've been good about powering down at night when not in use and turning stuff off.

I've also been playing with solar stuff. Not so much to offset any real electrical cost, mostly for fun, but I've got a small solar array outback sized in at about 140 watts. Gonna add another 100watt panel or two in the coming months and expand the battery bank and start actually putting a load on it... but for now, it's just for fun/learning.


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## pcan (May 30, 2015)

This is a interesting comparison between two houses with a very different energy profile. Let's go a bit further. The monthly breakdown of my electric power usage:

KWh 132 - march 2014
KWh 123 - april 2014
KWh 166 - may 2014
KWh 127 - june 2014
KWh 197 - july 2014
KWh 204 - august 2014
KWh 164 - september 2014
KWh 133 - october 2014
KWh 129 - november 2014
KWh 94  - december 2014
KWh 122 - january 2015
KWh 128 - february 2015
KWh 131 - march 2015

The medium price for 1 KWh for my consumption pattern (mostly outside office hours) is 0.1690 Euro (0.0616 Euro before taxes). This is higher than yours but not so much. 

The monthly natural gas usage is 17 cubic meters on summer (hot water) and 65 cubic meters in winter (hot water and heating), with a total annual usage of 494 cubic meters at medium price of 0.8822 euro per cubic meter (0.3045 euro before taxes). I don't work at home, this way the heating expense is low. 

The median combined gas + electricity montly bill is about 60 euro/month (about half as much as yours).

For comparison purposes, price and/or usage data are more useful when divided by the area, to get energy consumption density index. 

Total electric power usage is 1718 KWh (as I said before); the apartment is about 60 square meters, therefore the density of electric power usage is 28.63 KWh per square meter per year.

The natural gas usage density is 8.233 cubic meters per square meter per year.


The total energy cost is slightly above 9 euro per square meter per year.

It would be interesting to compare to your index (1 square meter is about 10 square foot).

My indexes are far worse than newly built high efficiency house, but is pretty much the best I can imagine as a viable retrofit for a existing building. Our family also own a house built in 1876 that has been refitted in the same fashion, with comparable energy savings. The comfort is also better: modern window frames are less romantic than the old wooden ones, but so much more functional.

As side note, my numbers clearly states that I would have never recovered the expense for the insulation/technology improvements with the gas/energy savings alone. The deal breaker is the tax incentive and the increased property value (due to a recent law that basically penalizes houses with bad insulation). You would find very few houses here still with single pane windows and old-style non-inverter AC units; electric furnaces aren't used because the electric energy cost is so much higher than other fuels. Wood has been neglected but is becoming popular again, with modern burners with heat exchangers and radiators to extract fumes heat and release it on other rooms. Again, they are covered by incentives, while traditional inefficient wood fireplaces are not.


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