High Voltage
In the top 97% of Urban's most interesting posters
I still don't know how I was using so much for so much of the year for so long - surely can't be carelessness with 9 watt LED lamps ... even raising seedlings under up to 70 watts of light 24/7 only adds up to 1.7 units a day ...
When I was working and bathing every Sunday that was 1 kwh per day - weighed against not being home during the day.
Well I'm hopefully on top of it now.
Just go back and check some of my earlier posts. I was nearly going spare trying to understand my energy usage
I've ended up with a spread sheet listing, pretty much, everything in the house that uses power, their hourly (or daily) power consumption and how long approx they're on for, with some rounding for sanity, and I've got a model which pretty accurately reflects our summer usage. So much so that I can explore what having stuff switched on for different lengths of time or numbers of cycles in the case of, say, the dishwasher, looks like
It was a combination of using those plug in meters, checking on the manufacturers web site for power usage of the white good in question (they're all pretty new so the figures for the actual unit can still be found or one close enough to use, the owl reader turns out to over read by 25%, so an 8KWh day is actually only 6 from the main consumer unit.
This also highlighted that we had a broken AND jammed three way powered valve on our hot water/central heating system that I didn't know about. So when the lpg boiler was coming on to heat water only it was also running the central heating as well. This is now fixed. And the 3KW(?) immersion heater which is used to boost the water temperature in the hot water tank has been switched off. And the daily lpg burn used to give hot water has been reduced from 1 hour a day down to 30 minutes with no noticeable effect on the hot water. Underfloor heating in the bathroom - OFF for all the summer, this will be the only extra winter power usage so easily monitorable
I've also got in touch with the lpg supplier to see if they do a more accurate measuring system, they do, and I'm exploring getting one of those installed so I can see if getting this and next winters gas usage out of our tank is feasible, I think it might be if we're frugal, but like you we're both home now, as both recently retired, so use will almost certainly increase. I suspect wood and coal will probably do the heavy lifting on our heating
Edit: stupid typos
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