I’m always astounded by other people’s electricity consumption. How does this person use over 50kWh per day? That’s almost as much as I use per month! Do aircons use that much power?
The big ticket items are the two pumps, the hot water, the fridges and the aircon units.
We also have electric heaters going in Winter.
It all adds up. We do 50kwh a day quite often. Sometimes 80 in summer when all the aircons are on and the pool heatpump is too.
And then yes, you need to provide your own water pressure too.
Wait why are you running a heat pump for the pool in the summer?
Believe it or not, air conditioning systems sometimes even have to reheat the air! Sometimes you have to make the air much colder than desired just to dehumidify the air, and then you must reheat it to get it back to a reasonable temperature.
There are some cool innovations in alternatives that don’t rely on all this psychrometric chart hacking, like using membranes and dissidents to perform the dehumidification, or using direct/indirect evaporative cooling etc etc.
Edit: oh and of course space conditioning demands go up pretty linearly with total volume of air, which is in turn linear with total floor area. So could also just be a big home.
It's also amazing how so many houses in warm countries are so poorly isolated and have bad window screens to avoid the sun heat up the inside of the building.
No difference winter/summer because we have gas heating. Maybe that's where the difference goes.
They also say they consume 177kWh in a summer month which amounts to more than 50kWh per day.
I'm really curious what people's base load is though. Mine is about 300W which seems very high and I can't figure out what would be using all that power. I guess we have 3 routers, an American style fridge and a Quooker tap, but even so... feels like it should be half that.
Guess I need to go around with a power meter.
One provided by Virgin that contains the cable modem and I have to use. I put it in modem mode though because its WiFi is crap.
One main WiFi router.
One extra one we have in our garden room (main WiFi doesn't reach that far).
> American style fridge-freezers are notoriously inefficient.
Yeah, though the specs for it claim 70 W average. I guess that may be optimistic so call it 100 W. That is quite a bit tbf.
I don't know why getting two separate appliances would be more efficient?
Two separate appliances really was more efficient. The European models were vastly more efficient than the American ones (European ones were like A+ rating; American were like F with not much in between). I think the American style ones are a bit better now, though (they're probably European specific models).
A quick search indicates that 1kg of pellets generates ~5kwh. So when burning 4to. of pellets in winter that adds about roughly 50kwh per day.
When using burner tech to heat, a good way to reduce the cost and profit from pv is to add a heating rod in the buffer tank of the heating system.
We live in a complex with 84 units, each with a solar roof, outputting about 12 kWh per unit per day. Maybe the owner just has a massive house, as they are outputting about 5x as much as our 2024 solar panel models …
How much difference can that make?
Beyond the dynamics of direct irradiance, there’s also weather to consider- if you live in a significantly cloudier area (which might be possible, assuming you live in Canada or Germany/netherlands/etc based off that latitude), that will obviously affect output.
And then there is also things like building-to-building shading, in case you live in a dense area… lots of things can affect this kind of calculation.
Try playing around with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s PVWatts calculator:
With 3 kids and winter time for heaters I’m using ~44/day average. ~26/day during summer.
That's in Paris, France.
Even a bit of microwave use won't eat much into that budget, as it's going to be 6-12 minutes per day at 1 kW, or an average of 4-8 watts.
Heating is the much harder one to find electric solutions for, but I'm sure there are plenty of examples of the right combination of temperate climates and good insulation/insolation design for that.
So far this year, our net grid import is 3000kWh and solar generation is 2500kWh. We have a 5kW heat pump and that uses quite a lot of electricity in winter when we don’t generate too much.
Especially in the winter months when it’s blowing but not sunny. But I don’t see people selling this setup.
A fully running aircon for a single room pulls around 1kw per hour, while it usually runs about 15 mins per hour in an efficient environments, depending in temps, humidity and insulation.
Not speaking oft a whole house...