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Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

200+ kWh per day consumption. In ~6 days this guy has used more electricity than me for an entire year. I get he also charges his electric car, which takes up a big chunk, but it still blows my mind how much electricity the average American home consumes.

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There's nothing 'average' about using 200 kWh/day in the US. Where I live in the US, the average temperature (not the high!) is in the upper 80s right now. My home is not large by US standards, but it is old and not nearly as well insulated as a newer home. The A/C runs continuously for hours on end each day, and right now we are using 35-40 kWh/day.

So yeah, I'm pretty sure most of that 200 kWh/day is going to charge the car.

200kWh is about 700 miles of charge (and he says he doesn’t charge every day). There’s something weird going on, but it’s definitely not typical usage.

I suspect an instrumentation/configuration problem before I’d suspect an average usage of almost 5x mine.

rich guy with a big air conditioned house?

Or rich guy with a heated pool.

Edit: Sorry I made a stupid mistake. Should be 30kWh/day! That tracks much better with your own figure. Ignore the blow.

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You're right, most use less because they don't charge a car. The average seems to be about double that though at ~74 kWh/day: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3

Taking that average it would take around 2 weeks to reach my yearly consumption. Should be noted that's for something like 2.7 people, mine is a two person household.

charging a car is ~20kwh a day, not 150

even if he fully charged the car from 0 to 100% every day, that isn't half of 200kwh

You are using about 1200 kWh per year? That seems quite low.

My desktop computer (2017 27" iMac), router, network switch, a Thunderbolt drive enclosure with 3 SSD drives, and a Hue hub averages 80 watts. That's 700 kWh per year right there.

If I'm quick in the shower I'm done in 3 minutes, using around 6 gallons of hot water. It takes 740 watts to heat 6 gallons of water from the temperature it comes out of my well to my shower temperature and I shower at least daily, so if my electric water heater was 100% efficient and its insulation was so good that there was no loss of heat from the tank to surrounding air that would be another 270 kWh per year.

My electric clothes dryer is 5600 W. That takes about an to dry a week's worth of clothes. That's another 290 kWh per year.

So that's brought me to 1280 kWh per year for just some modest computing, a short daily hot shower, and drying my clothes after washing.

Add in a 50 watt fan to circulate air in the house, running 12 hours a day. That's another 220 kWh.

How are you getting by on 1200 kWh per year?

And the fact that he gets it for free, but the electricity company still needs to build out the network (and profit) can tell you: solar power is going to be taxed heavily.

Which, ironically, tells you the major advantage of the tesla solar roof: not easily visible that it's solar panels, and thus easy to avoid tax with.

> not easily visible that it's solar panels, and thus easy to avoid tax with.

I doubt that. If you're consistently consuming a lot less electricity than your neighbors, that will be pretty easy for the utility company to notice, at which point they can send a technician out to your house to have a look. They probably already have to do this from time to time to investigate people who engage in meter tampering.

Around 20 minutes in, he gives his year total as around 54MWh (which is still insane to me, but less than a third-higher figure would be).

Looking at my bill, we average between 36kWh/day and 45kWh/day on all months except August (where I do put in the window shaker ACs and the usage soars to 65-70kWh/day). That’s for a family of four, lots of computer usage, working from home, and a 250W basement computer rack (6kWh/day on its own).

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