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Comment by shiftpgdn | Hacker News Reader

I do about 100kWh/day but I have a 4000 sqft house in an city that’s 100F with 100% humidity half the year and I have two electric cars.

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That is obscenely high. Where I live, it would cost over ~~150k~~ 7k USD to use that much power every day for a whole year. How is it even possible to use this much energy??

This means that you pay ~4 USD per kWH. That's almost 12 times more expensive than in Germany where electricity is supposedly expensive. Where do you live?

I pay around 0.20/kWh, but I made a mistake in my calculations! It would “only” cost 600$/month or 7’200 a year.

You pay more than 4 USD per KWh? Wow.

Do you mind shared where this is?

I pay around 0.20/kWh, but I made a mistake in my calculations! It would “only” cost 600$/month or 7’200 a year.

Wow, how is 100 kWh/day even possible? We consume about 3 kWh/day (excl. heating) in our standard-sized 2-person Dutch household, living pretty normal life.

Its going to be 39C at about 60% humidity today here with a bright sun beating down. My home has some decent insulation, double paned low-E windows without metal framing, thick attic blown insulation, etc. AC is set for about 26C. I'll probably still use about 70kWh of power today with the majority of that being the AC. A pool pump uses a good bit of power too though, pumping about 60,000 gallons of water through the filters uses a good bit of power.

You can do 3kWh maybe if you are not cooking using electricity or running a cleaning machine for dishes or clothes.

I've installed an electricity meter 2 weeks ago, and the lowest it got was 4,8 kWh/day in a 2-person Croatian household, although I do have a small Synology NAS running 24/7 and we have a TV on for a couple of hours.

We do 3kWh/d including a dishwasher and washing machine, electric oven, kettle etc. We use gas stove and we don't have air conditioning.

2 Adults, 2 kids, also close to 10 kWh per day (cooking on electricity (induction) but showering on natural gas, 0.6-0.8 m3/day). When we are not home, it's about 4 kWh per day (2 freezers, 1 fridge, home server, router etc). Big sources are Laundry, dishwasher, hot water in the kitchen (5L boiler).

But we heat the house on gas, and last december we burned about 180 m3 of it. Now, during summer, (in the Netherlands) we don't need heating or air-conditioning.

2 adults, 1 kid, belgium. One adult is always WFH (we alternate). Average of 13KWh per day. There is a server rack running in the basement though 24/7 but its optimized (nucs and rpis and no costly energy burning servers) and this rack alone accounts for 3-4 KWh per day (out of the 13)

We heat and cook using natural gas.

The biggest consumer are the same here. Dishwasher and laundry.

Also Home Assistant [0] with SlimmeLezer [1, or is this a Dutch thing?] and Shelly Plug S [2]? :)

All that stuff gives one great insights into what a kWh is (how much energy), where you use the most energy etc. I love it.

[0]: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2021/08/04/home-energy-ma...

[1]: https://www.zuidwijk.com/product/slimmelezer/

[2]: https://shelly.cloud/products/shelly-plug-s-smart-home-autom...

Not sure how you are managing this, are you sure your numbers are correct? When I turn my kettle on it consumes more then 2kW, yes it is running for a few minutes at a time but it all adds up, not to mention the electric oven.

With all major appliances off (except the fridge/freezer) I consume ~0,13 kW/h, that adds up to 3,36 kWh in 24 hours.

24kWh a day here. Fairly large house near Cape Town, South Africa. This is excluding heating in winter, for which we mainly use a slow combustion fireplace and also natural gas. Stove is also natural gas. Rarely use AC for cooling.

> how is 100 kWh/day even possible

Easy, live in a house 4x the size of a 2-person Dutch household and in a climate that averages 10 degrees C warmer, like would be common in the southeast US.

80 here

I ran your figures through a local price comparison engine. [0] Cheapest rate for you here would be ~12800€, or ~$13400/year. For reference, that's slightly less than half the median net income here. [1]

I also made a quick price comparison between the US and here:

- electricity? US: 0.14€/kWh [2]; here: ~0.30€/kWh [0]

- diesel? US: 1.40€/l [3]; here: 2.19€/l [4]

- gasoline? US: 1.26€/l [5]; here: 2.39€/l [4]

- natural gas? US: 0.44€/m³ [6]; here: 1.16€/m³ [7]

My conclusion is the US provide a reference framework of cheap abundant energy. The environmentally conscious have to deal with a framework that stimulates unbridled energy consumption, with hardly any real incentives for conserving energy.

[0] https://vtest.vreg.be

[1] https://www.vlaanderen.be/statistiek-vlaanderen/inkomen-en-a...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/204169/retail-prices-of-...

[4] https://carbu.com/belgie/index.php/officieleprijs

[5] https://gasprices.aaa.com/state-gas-price-averages/

[6] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3010us3m.htm

[7] https://www.ebem.be/mgt/803697.fil

Update. Local price comparison site was just updated this morning. Price here would be between 14569€ (.40€/kWh) and 17308€ (.47€/kWh) depending on the supplier chose. This includes all taxes and surcharges.

But you live in an expensive European country. Shouldn't you compare your prices to expensive US states? Or European averages to US averages?

Something is off here, even if both your cars use about 40kWh per day, every day (which is humongous) that would still leave an absolutely staggering 60kWh/day. That would be the same as heating with electric alone a house in the Nordic Lapland during winter.

60 kWh/day would not be enough to heat a modest sized house (~2000 sqft) in Lapland, even with geothermal heating.

Unless you meant 100 kWh/day, which would be doable, but I think only with geothermal.

Given a COP of 5 for a ground source heat pump you can calculate 60/24 is 2,5kW power draw around the clock. Multiply by 5 give 12,5kW heat non stop. That is a lot of heat.

2000 sqft is 185m2 which is a mansion by my standards though :)

I don't know Lapland, but that house is significantly larger than average (97m²) for Finland [1].

Average electricity cost in Finland is €0.184/kWh.

[1] https://www.finnwards.com/living-in-finland/how-much-do-home...

2000 sqft and you call it modest?

And 60 kWh/day is still enormous.

Average sq ft for house in US is around 2500sq ft so 2000 sq ft is below median. Ok starter house but not more than that. I understand that houses in Europe are much smaller though due to low incomes and higher utility costs.

I have 2800 sq ft house and use around 30-35 kWh/day in summer. 60kWh/day is high but not outrageously high.

60 kWh/day is definitely not much in climate where temperature can go below -40F/-40C.

21900 KWh in a year is not much according to what source?

I just ran my last year's electricity. I'm around 26 kWh/d in the DC area in an old inefficient house around 1500 ft^2. While it had a gas stove, gas water heating, and gas house heating, it did have electric window AC units. I'd be really interested in how the previous author had 6-8 kWh/d.

I used about 8 KWh/day when I lived alone in a 1550 sqft townhouse with gas heat and cooking. That ran my IT equipment, refrigerator, and blower fans for heating and exhaust. No AC usage.

Now I'm in single family home and my energy use is bonkers, but most of that is heating while I'm missing part of my roof and an entire exterior wall. It should be criminal for a town to take two years to approve permits.

I'm using 5-7 kWh/d. Pretty constant. Includes washing machine and induction stove, but excludes heating the apartment and hot water.

My last bill I ran 95kWh/day. Smaller house but have several adults and even more kids who all shower and do laundry as well as other things. I wish I could get it down half as much I don't see how I could at this point.

A air-water heatpump for heating that shower water would pay itself back in a few months. Solar panels would get the rest. Water is probably your biggest energy sink.

Hello fellow Texan.

Damn. That would come to about USD 18k a year where I am.

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