Our electricity usage - gamers about?

[WheeshtYaBam]

We use 100kwh of electric, give or take, every single week.

That equates to about 5,600kwh per year. Massively high usage for our family of 3 adults and 2 kids, I think.

My husband games and used to have a massive gaming PC. Anyone else game and have similarly high usage?

I was religiously tracking but a baby and MATL put a spanner in that. Back to it before price increases in January.

Our gas and electric last year was £3885. Mental. Want to get a handle on it because I think it's far higher than normal.

My husband on the other hand isn't as fussed. Says it's my dryer usage but I've just read that thread about the Lakeland dryer and that's what's prompted my question as I'm not using my dryer as much as that.

Nobody?

It's not your PC.

I'm also a PC gamer, I have one I use to game, another that is on 24/7 as a dedicated server. My electricity bills are minuscule, like £2-£3 per day. PC's, consoles, Monitors and so on use next to nothing.

Tumble drying devours energy.

Family of 4 (young kids) we used 450kw last month... I'm not entirely sure it is an unreasonable amount of electricity.. we obviously use less in the summer ect but annually about 4500kw.

Big ticket items often include electrical showers for example mine runs at 10kw an hour. Dish washers can at times use a fair amount e.g. a regular cycle is 1.5/2kw but the eco setting on mine is 0.5kw.

DS X-box uses a horrific amount of power and we noticed the difference straight away. We get peaks in our electricity usage whenever there's an inset day and DH and I are both at work!
We've asked him to stop watching Netflix on it too and to use the PC or TV instead.

@WheeshtYaBam Ages ago we bought Tapo devices which are smart plug energy monitor things, you plug them in to the socket and then plug the devices into that so for the teens' game set up they have an extension lead with everything on there. Then using the app you can see how much electric is being consumed.

With this device (we have several) you can see exactly what each device is using and could try to cut down if you wanted to. We now use them as timer plugs for some lamps as you can program them too. We got ours from Amazon. That way you can prove what the tumble dryer uses and what the gaming computer uses. Cold, hard facts. Dh says Ds's tower alone is 450w plus 2 monitors. We cannot comment, Dh has 3 monitors for his job!

The boys have an electric shower in their bathroom which is 10kw, that costs a lot. Everything you plug in uses electricity and you would be amazed how much it adds up, charging phones, tvs, toasters, kettles, hoovers etc. I used to work for an electricity company, the annual usage quoted often is too low. You can have Doris who lives alone next to a family with 2 teens, all the smart devices we all use.

One adult and two teens and we use about 60 kwh a week. One gaming PC, one XBox and we use the dryer constantly as we live in a flat so nowhere to hang stuff. I wfh so appliances are always on - I feel like I boil the kettle about 50 times a day.

We don't have a dishwasher, but if we did, we would be closer to 80 I guess.

100 doesn't sound unlikely for an extra two people with associated laundry etc.

My usage is higher than yours, there are 4 of us (sometimes 5).
I don't know why it's so high. No gaming here. I avoid using the dryer.
I charge my car which probably adds a fair bit.

Gaming PCs can use quite a lot, especially if they're left on for hours at a time. However, it's unlikely to be the whole picture. I see he blames 'your' dryer use - I assume that you're also drying his clothes and his DCs clothes/nappies?

5600 kWh of electricity per year is about double the national average, which suggests that electricity is being used for heating, hot water, or a lot of cooking or tumble dryer use.

How do you heat your home? Gas, or electricity? Same question for hot water - what type of shower do you have? Electric showers use a lot, ours is rated at over 10 kWh, so a typical MN family of multiple showers a day could be costing £50+ pm just on showering.

How many loads a week are going in the tumble dryer? Do you have a gas bill on top?

Dh says Ds's tower alone is 450w plus 2 monitors

That will be the maximum power output of the PSU.

I'm running two PC's, both of which have 1000w PSU's installed, draw is around 700w on one when it's going full bore, the other is on 24/7 but draw is a lot less. Together they get through about 2-3Kw/H of electricity per day. Obviously setups using multiple monitors will be more expensive to run, but if it's a relatively low powered machine that can run on a 450w PSU, then the draw will not be as much as mine.

It works out about 75p - £1 per day to run my PC's, and they're both latest tech with thirsty GPU's.

Kids are not skyrocketing your electricity bill by playing games. Not unless they're running their own space programme on a bank of supercomputers.

I take it you have gas heating? What about the shower?

My house is all electric including heating. I used 500kw last month but didn't have the heating on a lot. So far in November I've used 500kw with the heating on daily. So 100kw a week sounds a lot to me just for power.

We had 3 teens gaming all the time. Our electricity bill was hideous.

I even phoned the electric company. They said our reading was like a student house with 8 people in it.

Nightmare

Consoles on large TV's by any chance?

Large TV's, especially if they're older Plasmas, eat a lot of electricity compared to monitors. Not sure about the consoles themselves because I'm not a console gamer, but given they're compact and the parts are lower spec than top-end PC's, I can't imagine the power draw is any greater than a typical gaming PC.

They generate a ton of heat, but that's likely because they aren't that great at dissipating it, rather than a sign they're actually burning more energy.

Quick google suggests a Playstation 5 draws 350w at full tilt, so nowhere near that of a top-end PC, but if you have three of them going, three TV's, kids with lights on, music blaring, doors wide open, etc then I suppose that will all add up.

You might want to consider the mental health side of things before you take his computer away a lot of gamers use games to decompress and it honestly just sounds like the start of an argument if your both blaming one another already. Maybe you could agree to cut back on another area to cover it that doesn’t solely rest on the inconvenience of just one person. Then you can use your dryer and he can play his computer.

Gaming PCs can use quite a lot, especially if they're left on for hours at a time

That really depends how, exactly, they're used.

My gaming rig draws about 700w when it's being stressed. I have to run brand new AAA titles on max settings to make it hit the peak demand, and then that's only for a few minutes max because all games naturally have peaks and troughs where they'll be stressing the machine one minute but more or less idle the next.

I tend not to be gaming for more than a few hours at a time, and the majority of the time it's on it's idling along at somewhere between 100-200w because things like browsing or watching Youtube don't stress the GPU at all.

It's similar when playing less demanding titles, i.e. peak draw gets up to 300-400w but rarely any higher.

If kids are playing demanding games for 12-16 hours at a time, then yes, that's going to use a fair old chunk of electricity, but if they're playing something relatively undemanding, Minecraft or such, it'll be a lot less, and if the machine is just left idling it's going to be drawing next to nothing, especially if, like it should be, it's set to go into sleep/hibernation when left untouched.

There are plenty of BIOS options on newer machines that can cut CPU wattages down to minimums, third party stuff you can run from inside the OS to reduce power draw and heat generation, but they can cause instability if they're tampered with willy-nilly, so it's best to get someone who really knows what they're doing if you really want to optimise your machine to run as cost-efficiently as possible.

Our bills went down a significant amount when DS1 moved out for a while. He was attempting to be a semi pro gamer for a while and was gaming for up to 12 hours a day and taking long showers. He now has a more energy efficient PC and goes to college ( thank goodness) so usage is down a bit and electricity usage is high but just about doable. You can tell it's the PC using energy because even his new one heats the smallish room he uses even when the heating is off its warm.

At DSs heaviest usage he was doing a lot of VR gaming ( he won some tournaments).

Two adults WFH, both big gamers (pc and consoles). A kid. We have air conditioning which we use for heating sometimes as it’s cheaper than heating the whole house, and I use the tumble dryer a lot.

we use 18kwh per day/126 per week. Yes it’s high but it is what it is.

If the room is getting warm then that's a good sign that the cooling is working effectively. Depending on the architecture CPU's can operate perfectly safely at temperatures approaching 100c. It's a scorching hot piece of metal, and if that heat isn't dissipated properly and efficiently then it will dramatically shorten the life of the components. Even a CPU that only draws 70w or thereabouts will still run at 80-90c if you let it, because they trade off computational speed for heat generation, so it's important you provide adequate cooling.

If the room is warm, that's a sign the PC is venting warm air efficiently, but not necessarily a sign of excessive or large power draw, because all that heat is being generated by a die a few cm across that perhaps only draws 150w maximum. If the room isn't warm when you are gaming, then that's when you should worry because it's a sign a stressed PC isn't being cooled efficiently, and all that heat is likely being built up inside the case, or the CPU is running at an excessive temperature and not dissipating the heat properly to the cooler.

Thanks all for input. Somewhat reassuring.

He's not fussed. Says it is what it is. I'd like to pay less, of course I would, especially since 18 months ago we were paying half that. Everyone is the same though.

Electric shower and electric cooking plus a dishwasher. Reading your comments these will be impacting too.

Think I'll keep a wary eye and make changes where I can.

We are a family of three, two x box and a gaming PC plus DH has two computers and the monitors and often WFH. Our usage last year cost us 2.4k. We also have streaming services. Many a time DS will be watching Netflix or gaming as will I in different room as will DH or he will be working.

It is all about heating and cooling that are the main big users of power.

One of my friends has two sons who like taking 20 minute showers and as they do sport that’s more than once a day. It’s stuff like this that really adds up. I’m in and out in 5 minutes usually. Also how much people wash stuff, I will wear jeans multiple times, I know someone who will wear them once only.

Family of 3 with an electric car and electric shower, 2 working from home with 2 PCs and 5 monitors switched on all day. Consistently around 500kWh per month. Electric car and electric shower are the big consumers.

An average gaming PC Tower has a 600W-800W power supply, however, this is the maximum it has available to use, and does not mean that it's using the full amount 24/7, it rarely ever will. The average could be something like 400W when gaming, depending on the graphics card inside, or as low as 150W-200W browsing the internet or WFH.
An LED monitor on average uses 12W-15W which is very minimal.

Compare that to a tumble dryer running at 2000W consistently, a combi boiler running intermittently at 30,000KW, an average mains-powered 2000W vacuum, or the 3-Tier Lakeland dryer at 300W.