Curious as to whether our home electricity usage is typical or whether it's unusually high.
Fyi we are in Victoria (Melbourne West, our supplier is Jemena) with smart meter. 3 person household, 2 adults working full-time + toddler in daycare during the week.
We have gas water heater but everything else in the house is electric (heating cooling cooking etc all electric).
I've looked at our smart meter usage online and it seems legit, but our bill says we are using more than a 5 person household! I'm a bit shocked and wondering if this is really true. We generally try to be environmentally conscious so this is a bit disconcerting for me on that level.
Fyi we are billed monthly. We used 675 kilowatt hrs in September, or an average of 22.5 per day. Is this oddly high for our household? I'll add a poll
Is our electricity use normal?
Poll Options
- 30We are using heaps more than 2.5 full size humans ought to be
- 20It's relatively average
- 0It's lower than average
Comments
Those "average" households don't mean much because there is so much variance depending on what type of systems your house has:
- hot water service
- heating/cooling
- pool/spa (pump and/or heating)
- other uncommon things that can swing usage, like solar feed-in or an electric vehicle charger.So the whole "X person household" measuring stick is pretty useless.
Sure it's normal, for you
Guess it depends but personally seems a little high, do you use air conditioner/heater a lot? And how much/big is the hot water system? My average is 1.92kWh a day or about 175kWh in 3 months. You're like 3.9 times higher then me in 1 month then I am in 3.
Granted I live alone in a small apartment and hot water is heated centrally (so doesn't come out of my bill) which I think is the biggest difference, I also don't cook at home. But guessing you might have something thats really sapping the electricity (for me its typically aircon during the summer months).
Lol - you don’t pay for hot water or cook (easily the biggest energy uses in a house) and are saying that OP’s usage is high. Perhaps you should consider the possibility that your usage is unusually low. Crazy, I know…
Perhaps a bit high. Ours is five person with pool and about 26kwh per day. We use very little heating or cooling, have gas for stove top but off peak hot water.
How much heating and cooling do you use?
We have a reverse cycle air con in our living room, it's our only heating / cooling in the living areas of our house.
During the week we run it in the evenings only, perhaps 3 hours a night from 6pm-9pm. On weekends, we tend to rub it during the day when home, perhaps 7 hours total over the day.
We have electric blanket in our room. In our daughters room we have one of those oil fin heaters that we run overnight, e.g. 7am-7pm each day.
Our house is a 50's weatherboard with no wall insulation and pretty ancient ceiling insulation, it doesn't retain heat well.
We have induction cooktop and electric oven. We cook 6 nights a week.
Otherwise there's the washing machine and dryer, which we use a bit given the toddler…The oil heater is going to account for a fairly big chunk, especially if you don't have an on/off peak tariff.
We're on a flat rate
@Egilmore: Yeah… Likely to be quite expensive to run the oil heater for 12 hours.
Where are you? We're in South Victoria on a peninsula and it gets cold at night. My three year old doesn't have the heater all night. We turn it on for an hour or so before bed time and then turn it off. She's fine and the room temp is ok.
This ^ . It is possibly the heating elements that are contributing to most of your bill. If you have a smart meter you can check this by not using it for a day and checking the usage drop. For reference we are in a 3 bedroom unit, 3 people. No one is at home during the day. Our last billing was around 190kWh which is significantly lower than yours but our heating is gas, so take it for what it is worth.
When you list all this plus the fish tank and the old house your bill starts to make sense.
I'm guessing your lighting is either incandescent or halogen DLs?
Personally, I'd turn off the heater in the kids room and get them to wear flannelette PJs and an extra blanket. Also reduce the heating and wear more clothes / ugg boots.
Also stop using the dryer. Start using sunshine (not always possible).
Maybe do an audit of what uses power and see where the easy fixes are. Possibly DIY a refresh of the roof insulation (assuming you own the house). Also think about insulating underneath the floor boards as that's where our old weatherboard used to suck in the cold air.
If you own the place then take advantage of the state government subsidy on Solar PV as well but it's better not to use the power at all.
yes I'm beginning to think the fishtank and oil heater are the main culprits…
Lighting is pendant lights (it's an older house) with fluorescent / CFL globes.
Could try turning off the heater overnight and see how our daughter sleeps, it does get pretty chilly in there because of the poor thermal efficiency of our home and the floorplan of the house, her room has 3 external walls.
You're right about the dryer, we probably run a load 4 times a week and should aim to reduce its usage. In summer we use the clothes line but sometimes in cooler months it's a challenge, particularly when we do all the washing over the weekend and need to get everything clean and dry for the following week.
We own the place but are selling. Also plan to get rid of the fish tank. Hopefully we see an improvement in our usage at the new place!@Egilmore: It can be difficult.
I was Mr Mum for my 2 and in winter the clothes airer seemed to be perpetually covered in clothes in the "warm room". My strategy was do a load overnight, hang it out in the morning on the airer and it was dry when i got home from work.
My kids used to take a hot wheat bag to bed with them to take the initial chill out of the bed. It's easier to cope with the cold than the heat/humidity (here in Sydney at least).
I think a 1000w oil heater for 10hrs/night will cost around $115/month @28.5c/kWh assuming it never reaches the thermostat cut off temperature
The tank heater is 100w? Assuming the thermostat never engages it's about $20/m per 100w. If you have a big tank it might be a 300w heater.
I assume you are on a good electricity plan?
@brad1-8tsi: I think we're on a good plan, Supply charge is 92.4 cents per day incl GST, usage is 19.283 cents per kwh incl GST. My concern is our actual consumption and how we can reduce it and our co2 emissions, more so than the cost.
I think there are some lifestyle changes we can make which will help, but i'm beginning to wonder if the fishtank is a real issue.
I don't know the specs on the fishtank heaters or filters, it's really my husbands hobby, but if we are using 22.5 kwh per day, and when we aren't home we're using 0.5kwh per hour, and the fishtank is the only thing that is actually on (other than things like our modem and the oven / microwave digital clocks!) then the fishtank alone could account for nearly 12 kwh per day, which is more than 50% percentage of our total usage!
Forgot we also have a rather large fish tank (550 litres) that is set to run around 27 degrees.
That's the only thing on all the time. Is that what's doing it? Our baseline use when no one's home and everything else is off is around 0.50 kilowatt hours per hour
Heating the fish tank at 27 degree 24/7 during winter is the main cause of your hiking your electricity bill. Try to buy a smart meter with live current usage then you can see how much the fish tank used.
Three person family with myself and daughter home all day. A media server running most of the day in the garage plus other normal electricity usage, or average daily usage for the past month: 11.015kWh.
I'd say yours is high.
I know your pain - we are also in a weatherboard house in Melbourne's inner west using electricity for heating.
I think that the averages presented on the bill are annual - this lines up with CanStarBlue assuming general energy usage of 4000kWh/year. https://www.canstarblue.com.au/electricity/average-electrici…
Our consumption is higher than yours (4-5 peeps) for winter months (!), while the consumption in other months is less than half the winter consumption.
that's interesting, based on our annual $ spend we seem about average based on that site, especially when I look at the data that compares spend by age range. But based on our bill we are way above average. Seems like there's a disconnect somewhere
how about you calculate your annual average usage? - I think this is a better figure to compare to the chart on the bill.
I've just downloaded our smart meter data. In the last 12 months from 1/10/2018 - 30/09/2019 we have used 6357 kwh
@Egilmore: So daily usage is 17kWh, in line (but not more) than a large household on the bill chart.
My guess is that many in the postcode (basis for bill chart) would have gas heaters, so perhaps your usage isn't too incredibly high (if you count the fish as members of your household!).
Why would you trust figures from a website that the ACCC has called out as a scam website?
According to the ACCC, comparison websites are showing a list of the highest paying commissions to the site visitors while informing the morons using it that they seeing a list of the cheapest providers.
According to the ACCC, most consumers have no idea what they're purchasing because they're unable to compare prices by design under the regulations set by the Australian Energy Regulator. The AER operates one of the scam websites known as Energy Made Easy.
Despite having no idea what they're purchasing, the morons insist that privatisation is working and prices are cheap. Which is delusional because they ACCC says the economy is crashing because of the highest electricity prices in the world along with privatised ports.
Australians, being controlled by the media, are doubling down on being wrong about privatisation working, naturally, because they're victims in a scam that are too dumb to work it out even though their losing their own money in the scam.
The figure I referred to on the site was a general estimate of electricity usage.
i.e. Victoria 4000kWh/year, as compared to NSW 3900kWh/year.At no point did I place any reliance on their information of prices and providers…
Although it is irrelevant to the OP's question, my guess is that they are on a pretty good rate (same as mine with Tango).
IMO the fact that you would ask and worry about it is a good bet that you are actually doing better than the "average". The power companies don't even explain how they calculated their numbers, as a rule of thumb they are garbage until proven otherwise.
It's that old fridge that you've got running in the garage.
haha maybe, except it's not plugged in right now…. Zombie Fridge?!
FWIW I find the figures that water & power companies use for "an X person household" to be wildly inaccurate.