Comment by fleddr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fleddr | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what causes this high electricity use. Not because it's any of my business, it's just genuine curiosity.

He never reveals actual use, only savings. Still, at 0.25$ per kwh charged and an average monthly saving of 210$, we can work out that 860 kwh/month was saved, which amounts to 10,320 kwh per year. Actual use may be (far) higher, but we don't know.

Just these savings alone is triple my total electricity consumption (in the Netherlands) in a fairly similar weather pattern. And I'm not exactly frugal with electricity: big TV, washer, dryer, powerful oven, multiple PCs, and even a few small power hungry electrical heaters (due to very high gas prices).

I'm not exactly projecting a personal situation. Our government has established that median/typical use of a dutch household is 2,900 kwh/year in order to qualify for the new price ceiling, a temporary measure to keep energy affordable.

So here we're talking about 3 times more than an above average consumer (me), and what might be a factor of 4-6 more than our median. Yet the person is unlikely to live in a mansion as he can't afford to pay for the panels in cash. I don't mean that in a judgemental way.

Large scale permanent electrical heating/cooling in every room? EV car? What would cause such enormous usage?

Again, I don't ask this to justify usage, only to understand it.

We're a family of four in the Midwest (US), and we average about 40 kwh/day. Roughly 14,000kwh annually. The only gas stuff we have is our hot water heater and furnace. Our A/C gets a work out in the summer when it is pretty warm (at least this year). I do about 8 loads of laundry a week, and I'm sure that my dryer is a big user of electricity. We have a lot of computers in the house between the four of us; three desktops and four laptops. I work from home, so a pretty consistent use for at least 2 of them. I don't think the house lights or smartphones are worth even tallying. I bet A/C is a good 50% of our usage, and that's focused largely between June and September.

Biggest culprits in energy consumptions are heating appliances. To save some bucks I usually set my thermostat 1 or 2 degrees under my ideal temperature and wear warmer clothes and I never used a dryer, I don't mind having clothes hanging on a rack on a corner of my flat.

I think my AC (even though new) is the biggest user, though the dryer is probably second.

Thanks, always useful to hear about real world examples.

I have a house from 1909, with relatively poor insulation, by modern standards. We heat the house with a heat pump and a 100 m deep borehole. The heating of the house (180 m2 and a cellar) is the main energy consumption. The total was 22 000 kWh last year (including about 3 500 kWh for an electric car). An old house with electric heating and cooling could well be what he has.

When we moved in the electric consumption per year was way higher, 35 000 kWh. We have gone through and made the house more effective, better white goods, windows, better ventilation etc. We also sold about 2 000 kWh of excess production from our solar panels.

"An old house with electric heating and cooling could well be what he has."

Definitely could be the case. Your situation is interesting in that it is opposite to the order of transitioning towards a heat pump over here. Perhaps a heat pump was your starting point as there was no gas connection?

Over here we start with gas heating (almost every house) after which we try to transition towards a heat pump. They say you should first insulate your house to the maximum possible before even considering a heat pump. Fail to do this and the heat pump won't even be able to produce enough. This calculation is of course locally specific, unlikely to apply to you.

In fact, many houses will never be able to transition and will end up with a hybrid pump as the maximum achievable.

Before I owned it, our house had an old oil/wood burner. And our heat pump doesn’t need help from an electric heater until it goes below -15C or so. But then it is a 20 year old heat pump.

An old house in California wouldn’t have electric heating. Even new houses scarcely have electric heating.

Tell that to my old CA house.. we rely on electric space heaters a lot.

I mean built into the house, like a fireplace, stove, furnace.

These are good and valid questions.

Relating to our solar panel install (refer another comment of mine in this thread) we went through with one of those plug in power meters and identified about spot and average power draw for about 80 different devices, spreadsheeted those data up to try to get a feel for where our power was being consumed -- as often times we would hit 40-50kWh/ day consumption.

Predictably (in retrospect) the biggest culprit by far was the hot water system. While we couldn't conveniently plug a meter in-line, it was fortunately wired up on its own phase (we're on 3-phase), and with the solar system install came a smart meter, which then provided some hour-by-hour insights.

A timer in the circuit-breaker box for the HWS, along with an element change (replacing the 2k4 with a 1k8 element) massively reduced consumption there -- I expect very many people have inefficient, and/or poorly configured, and/or poorly serviced electric hot water systems that are chewing through vast quantities of power.

TFA seems pretty savvy, so you'd hope this kind of low-hanging fruit isn't their problem, but OTOH you're right that those figures are very high, and you'd expect someone looking in this much detail at their power profile would be off-peaking all the high-draw systems they could.

That's clever. We also have a central smart meter in the house. It has a standard port (I believe it's called "P3") that allows you to read out usage. There's devices on the market that plug into this port, connect to your Wifi and then make it available to a mobile app. It reports total power usage in real time and gas usage with a delay of 15 mins.

I would recommend anyone to do such tour of the house. You're very likely to learn a lot and be in for a shock here and there. Totally agree with you that most people are far away from a state of micro managing energy, there's big wins to be had with little sacrifices in convenience.

And yes, that was the background of my question: If I'd save 210$ in electricity per month, my very first question would be why I even use that much in the first place. Could be valid reasons for it, of course.

The average New Englander uses between 567 kWh/month and 711 kWh/month (different values for different states - areas farther south generally use more).

The answer is probably that you live 5-10 degrees north of him and don’t use as much air conditioning.

I don't use any AC at all, true. But would you say that explains triple the usage? New England isn't exactly in the desert.

Electric heating and cooling (instead of gas, which while still energy doesn’t go in the same bucket) and probably a larger house.

His usage is high by the standards of the region, so it probably is also something like an electric car or crypto mining.

(For what it’s worth, a swamp is far harder to cool than a desert - five of the top six states in the US by energy usage are on the Gulf coast. The average Floridian household uses ~13700 kWh/year whereas New Mexico is ~8000 kWh/year. On the other hand, the household average in Canada is higher than in the US, so…)

Could be electric car(s) and longish daily commutes

That sounds plausible and I had not even considered the possibility of multiple electric cars.

It frankly worries me. Heat pumps and EVs are going to spike consumption dramatically, where even smallish price and taxation movements will have an outsized impact. Not to mention the grid being able to handle it at all, as most people can't ever generate anything close to that level.

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