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Comment by perardi | Hacker News Reader

One little thing that stuck out:

The USA leads the way in terms of household electric usage in the world – an average US household consumes approximately 975 kilowatt-hours of electricity each month, three times more than for example the United Kingdom.

Which got me wondering how big US domiciles are versus those in the UK. Turns out: lot of big-ass houses here in the US.

https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/how-big-is-a-house/

2164 sq. ft vs. 818 sq. ft

Which sure would explain that difference.

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I'd guess that a far bigger factor is that the US has a much higher percentage of houses the use electricity for room heating.

I believe that it is similar for water heating.

In the US there is also a high percentage of houses that use electricity for the stoves and oven and for clothes drying. A brief didn't turn up how much electricity is used for those things in the UK, but if it is like much of the rest of Europe I'd not be surprised if it is lower than in the US.

In the US around 26% of houses use electricity as their only energy source, compared to around 9% for the UK.

>In the US around 26% of houses use electricity as their only energy source, compared to around 9% for the UK.

Something that was interesting to me when I moved from California to central Oregon was that nearly everything was powered by electricity. I didn't even know anybody with a gas stove in Oregon.

I do not know anyone in Portland metro without a gas line to their house. Furnaces, stoves, and water heaters until recently use gas.

I am guessing central Oregon may have been too rural for it to make sense to install gas utilities everywhere?

Could be. We were also on the other side of an entire range of mountains so that may have also had something to do with it.

Rural uses Propane for gas

Midwest is a very common for most rural homes to have 500-1000 gal propane tanks. Propone is more expansive than NatGas but in cold weather it is still cheaper than resistive electric heat...

This seems to be true in the Boise Idaho area too. Our house was one of the few that had a gas stove.

Not to mention cooling. How many people in the UK even have air conditioning?

I've lived all over the UK, houses and apartments, and never had air-con.

You might get a week or so during summer when it's quite hot but then a large fan is sufficient.

Yeah whereas in the southern U.S. a lack of air conditioning is a medical emergency. It gets insanely hot down there!

It's technically uninhabitable. It only works because we have a lot of technology, similar to NL, the arctic and so on. There are a lot of areas in the world that we have essentially only borrowed as long as we can hold on to them but that are in most senses uninhabitable and hostile to unprotected life.

Is it uninhabitable? Maybe some specific areas in Arizona / New Mexico, the South Eastern US was already established States before air conditioning was even invented.

Yes, but not by these quantities of people. Critical infrastructure would be much harder to keep alive without AC and the same goes for the elderly. I would expect the average lifespan of the region to take a serious hit during a prolonged power outage in summer.

People used to die of cold, and so why not heat?

It was just the way things were.

People dying of heat in the US tend to have other serious medical conditions so it’s unlikely to change overall life expectancy significantly.

Also, peoples homes have been redesigned for AC. The most obvious being people used to sleep on upper story “Sleeping Porch” in the summers. Those living spaces have almost universally had walls added. There’s many more subtle architectural changes that have gone away such as ventilation above doors, setting homes up for cross ventilation etc. Most of which simple doesn’t make sense in a world with cheap AC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_porch / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_room etc

There are plenty of places where people live in hotter/more humid conditions. US dwellings and lifestyles are simply very badly adapted at natural conditions and the gap is made up for by expending energy.

I can see an underground metro requires air conditioning, but for most other things there are people in developing countries with higher temperatures who live without it.

"Uninhabitable" becomes meaningless if you dilute it to mean "you couldn't build a city-scale population centre here without some infrastructure". All cities need infrastructure!

Yea no. Been to Costa Rica many times and no one has AC. People aren’t dying on the streets. My brother in law lived there for 10 years with no AC and it’s hotter, for longer, than my home in the Deep South.

It's the combination of temperature, humidity, wind and other factors that poses health risks.

https://www.weather.gov/tsa/wbgt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

This stuff can and does kill and if you're not aware of it then pay attention: this is one of the more direct consequences of climate change, it may well push zones that are currently marginally habitable right into inhabitable.

Agreed. I would guess some desert areas might not be habitable but that's only a portion of a couple states. You can definitely live in places like Florida without AC.

Not to diminish your point there, but globally, it is cold that tends to kill the elderly, not heat. Despite being much less newsworthy, illnesses triggered by the cold kill about ten times more than heat strokes and similar health issues from excessive heat.

Meaning that a heating outage in a cold region would have a vastly more devastating effect than an cooling outage in a warm region.

People used to live there before ACs. It is down to inefficient construction designs.

Spot on it’s very hot where I am and I run the AC about 9 months a year. My house has 2 units. Even in the winter there could be hot days where I’ll need to run it.

Vast majority of people use electricity for stoves in the US. Electric is also common for water heating. Less common to use electricity for space heating except for the South and for auxiliary rooms.

> Vast majority of people use electricity for stoves in the US.

Apparently about 68%. That shocked me. I thought for sure gas was more common based off personal experience.

https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/29082/most-common-type-of...

Yeah, it’s actually weird, because of the role it has played in the culture wars recently, but gas stoves are actually kind of a “coastal elite” phenomenon. Most common around California and New York City (and surrounding areas). And becoming a trendy feature in high end homes.

And unintuitive enough that I get downvoted for pointing it out. shrug

That's wild. I guess it's location dependent because I don't know anyone with an electric stove.

And often that is good old resistive baseboard heating rather than a heatpump.

Not sure about that, it looks like overall energy consumption still is almost there times as high in the US compared to the UK: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab... It may be worth to mention that in the UK, energy consumption seems to be particularly low, below the EU average.

I am using 1300 kWh per __year__ in Germany in my three room apartment, with an electric oven and cooker. That is a lot of electricity for a single home, even with electric heating.

I went on vacation for two weeks last month and unplugged everything except the fridge and one HP Microserver N54L and the apartment averaged a little over 4 kWh per day (~120 per month, ~1440 per year)

However, when we are not on vacation the average is around 10 kWh per day.

Edit: We don't use electricity for heating or cooling (Sydney, Australia) as it's included with the apartment at a flat rate of 10 AUD (6.61 USD) per month

My total electricity use for 2022 was 1500kWh, so 4.1kWh/day.

Electricity for cooking, but not heating.

My usage in 2019 was 1300kWh/year, but that was before regular working-from-home.

That looks like you need a new fridge. And those little servers can really add up, I had a Synology 12 bay NAS with a 12 bay extension up and running 24x7 and it consumed about 300W continuously.

That's really not that bad. Consider that my house - freestanding, about 200 sq meters - was using ~10000 KWh in 2020. I radically changed all that when the war in Ukraine started and the difference is huge, we are now negative with respect to the grid and still use gas but that will soon go towards a heatpump. Conservation cut our consumption (including own solar consumption) by roughly 70%.

Heating is not just air heating but the hot water and the cloth dryer too. I have these running on gas and in a hot month, when the water heating is pretty cheap and the furnace does not run at all, I still spend about 1000 cubic feet of gas (300 kWh).

I am curious about quintile statistics, or at least median. Domiciles are definitely bigger in the US, but I bet the mean average is dragged way up by the top 20% of houses.

Air conditioning also uses the most electricity in a house, and the US has a lot more populated hot and humid regions than many European countries.

Nope, electric heating uses much more power than air conditioning.

I guess that is true, I just imagined so few domiciles actually use electric heating, or use electric heating in places that do not get really cold, that it is not a significant factor in national statistics of electricity usage.

Seems like 40% of US households use electric heating though, which is way more than I expected.

https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-questio...

Edit: fixed link

Most of that is going to be heat pumps in moderate climates.

Unfortuntately not. In 2015 35% of homes used electric heating, with only 12% (34% of electric homes) using heat pumps [1]. So the majority of electric heating is actually resistive electric.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39293

Bad link. But I'd like to see it by state. In Florida electric heat may exist but never be used, while Massachusetts needs heat and uses oil or gas.

Sorry, fixed

https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-questio...

By far more energy goes to heating than air conditioning, but a lot of heating in the US is natural gas (or oil in the northeast), especially in the colder places. About 43% of household energy use is heating and only 8% is air conditioning.[1]

But for overall household electricity use, air conditioning is 17% and heating is 15% (all houses, not just all-electric houses). [2]

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/homes.php

[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...

Up here in Alaska, heating your house with electricity would be asinine if you have any other option.

In time places like Alaska may well depopulate.

More space for me.

I think that’s only because it’s more expensive. Whether you heat with electricity or with gas/petrol you still need the same amount of energy.

> I think that’s only because it’s more expensive.

Well, sure it is - and that doesn't look to be changing any time soon.

Not if you use heat pumps...

Heat pumps are becoming widespread in Scandinavia, especially Norway — even though Norway is rich in fossil fuels.

Alaska is colder, but: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/heat-pumps-alaska-oil-energy...

Until I started working in the energy industry, I never considered that even gas heating consumes a lot of electricity because of the blower fan and ignition coils. Our blower fan is 0.5 HP, which is over 300 W. The bulk of our electricity expense has been on heat, even though we have gas heat!

Good point, I've realized the same. My electricity bill increases a higher percentage in winter than my gas bill. Our house has two furnaces and they use a lot of electricity

https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/mortgages/articles/how-big-i... claims the median in the US is 2014 sqft.

You would be wrong, even cheap houses in the US are quite large.

Is that an average? I had no idea it was that small in the Uk. I mean, what is the point of a house at that size? It just seems like it might as well be an apartment unit .

I've been saying the same thing to anyone who would listen - 80 sq meter paaprtment is much nicer than an equivalent terraced house, you lose like 15m2 to staircases, its a total waste.

Maij reason is the stupid leasehold laws - in UK you dont buy apartments, you buy a lease on apartment for 100 years. And there is a landlord of the entire buolding. And they can make up tlrandom rules, like forbod you from owning a cat or fish.

Its lime tyrany of a medieval lord

Plenty of apartments are sold with commonhold or share of freehold too, it's not all leasehold.

What the fuck??

That average is for all domiciles, so will include apartments - even studios. I would say a "standard" 3 bed house is bigger - usually 1000-1200 square feet.

That is a common and valid criticism of British houses.

There are old Victorian houses built for factory workers, although most of the smallest have been demolished: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-up_two-down

But they still build things almost as small now! [1] is wasting space on three bathrooms and a staircase, and has floor plans illustrated with what seems to be rather small furniture.

On the same development they have some apartments. [2] is poorly laid out (the long hallway is wasted space) but still manages to have more living area and costs £65,000 less.

[1] https://www.taylorwimpey.co.uk/new-homes/worthing/barley-gra...

[2] https://www.taylorwimpey.co.uk/new-homes/worthing/barley-gra...

You get a garden and no upstairs neighbors to stomp (or downstairs to care about your stomping).

Not only that, I used more heating in LA than in France (900m above sea level) because all the places I lived at had single pane windows that couldn't even physically close

It's so weird to use national averages here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35374014

Above is a link for many Canadian and US cities. The range is enormous.

Unless you live in a particularly hostile climate, house size alone won't change your consumption that much. Walls and floors don't draw power, appliances do.

The big difference is that in Europe in general it is much more frequent to directly burn something in your house in order to produce heat. Something almost unheard of in Canada for instance.

The site contains a link to the data source (globalpetrolprices.com), which says:

"The chart shows the price of electricity for households and businesses in over 100 countries. The prices are per kWh and include all items in the electricity bill such as the distribution and energy cost, various environmental and fuel cost charges and taxes."

England has ~25,000 sqft per person. That's the simple inverse of population density.

Everything has to come out of that budget.

You can build up...

Unfortunately in the UK apartments are associated with the dirty poors, so people prefer to live in awful tiny houses over spacious apartments.

> Unfortunately in the UK apartments are associated with the dirty poors

No they're not. If anything they're associated with dodgy leasehold, dodgy management fees and dogdy cladding.

None of which are usually issues in a house.

Otherwise there are a lot of luxury apartments.

Hardly any airconditioned houses in the UK and heating is mostly by gas. I expect that accounts for quite a lot of it.

It will be a combination of the British climate, and the inefficiency of American buildings (large, poor insulation), equipment (little incentive to reduce energy use with better appliances, timers to turn off heating/cooling when no one is home etc) and lifestyle (clothes must be dried in a machine, not on a line, t-shirt-warmth indoors even in winter).

British homes are terribly heat inefficient as well.

> the inefficiency of American buildings (large, poor insulation)

American dwellings being less well-insulated than British ones in aggregate absolutely does not pass the sniff test: British houses are older, and weather in the UK is much milder than in most of the US

> 2164 sq. ft vs. 818 sq. ft

> Which sure would explain that difference.

The amount of stoves, fridges and washing machines do not scale with area though.

You would expect larger houses having lower power use per square excluding electric heating and AC.

Climate control is by far the biggest single line item in home energy expenditure [1]. Hopefully in more moderate climates people can consider heat pumps and other more efficient technology to help with this.

[1]: https://www.directenergy.com/learning-center/what-uses-most-...

When visiting U.S for the first time, the thing that strikes you immediately are the sizes. Everything is bigger, much bigger in the U.S.

Food portions - you’re left wondering if you ordered one single meal, or one day’s worth. Shopping malls - I literally got lost at Macy’s in NYC. Cars - why are cars so big, especially the ones in cities? TVs are big. Even mundane stuff like glue sticks - they come in 3 packs, I can’t buy a single glue stick in most shops!! Most household items come in big packs.

Needless to say, all of this comically big items need space. So houses are big too!

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