How many kWh of electricity do you use a day??

[User952539]

I know I know it’s another energy one but ours seems to have gone nuts.

im being told by British Gas that we are using over 11000 kWh of electricity every year. We don’t have electric heating. We don’t think we are particularly big users of electricity but we clearly are.

google seems to say that the average is 4000 for a detached family home. This is making me question how ours can be so large since whilst our house is quite big it isn’t full of people using power in every room.

how much do you use on average a day according to your smart meter? And how big is your house/how many in it?

Av at 11kwh per day. 4 bed detached with 4 people. We have loads of techy stuff charging all the time. I wfh, DH is a gamer. We don't use the tumble dryer very often.

We’re about 7 kWh per day - 3 storey semi, 3 adults, washing machine and dishwasher are run every other day. We have a standard fridge-freezer and a small beer fridge running, plus the MVHR system runs 24/7. No electric showers.

DS was recently hit by big electricity bills in his flat - turned out that his flat mate had left the immersion heater on boost for a fortnight 😱

12-15 KWh per day on average.
2 electric showers, oil central heating, 1 teenager and an adult son who visits often.
4 bed detached 30 year old house with good insulation and modern windows.

We use about 26 a day in summer and over 40 in winter. 5 bed house. 3 teens and 2 adults. Both wfh. No tumble dryer.
Washer on twice a day. Dishwasher twice a day. One fridge freezer and one set I'd fridge drawers.
We have outdated downlighters inneskry every single beeping room when he previous owners extended. And my teens and DH are incapable of turning them off. Loads and devices, tvs etc
Getting all downstairs lighting uogaedee this summer which I am helping will help. Currently the 15 year bulbs blow in under one year.
I also cook a lot and hob and oven both electric. I cook every day and bake every other.
We are away at the moment and I have switched everything off at the mains except fridges so that will be interesting.

Sorry for horrendous typos....

We used 103KWh last month which is anything between 3 and 9 units a day. Higher useage is when we use the dryer for sheets/towels only once/twice a week. Oven is not used every day. Two of us 3 bed semi. One WFH.

Around 5kwh a day. 3 bed house. Family of 4.

9per day - but we don't have a boiler - so heating / hot water is electric. 2 bed flat with 2 adults and a toddler.

We are away at the moment and I have switched everything off at the mains except fridges so that will be interesting.

I'm going to do this - I'm determined to work out why we are using so much despite using a fraction of the appliances pp have going.
When DH went away for a day and switched off all his work equipment there was a noticeable drop for the day. If that accounts for much of it then unfortunately we'll have to lump it, as it's still cheaper than commuting to the office to use their equipment ...

Also i forgot to say we have an electric car and my mum charges hers once a week at ours too.... that's a pretty big 'forget'...

We use around 750kWh per month

We have an electric car, chest freezer, drinks fridge and tumble dryer. 5 bed terrace. Hot water and heating are gas though. Varying number of occupants (anything from 2 to 8 people at any one time)

2021 was 2065 kWh of electricity. Four bed (on three levels) inc electric oven, microwave, the usual white goods and an electric shower. Lots of computers also.

So just to update, as of just now we have apparently used 13.2 kWh of electricity. This includes the dishwasher being on and two washing loads. Dh has had all his screens on plus his computer since he’s been working all day. I’ve been working on my laptop. Ds2 has had the tv on virtually all day and ds1 has been on the ps5 for two hours.

Your laptop/screens etc are not your problem, it’s all your refrigeration.

It’s can’t be the fridges. They run all night and overnight our consumption shows as very low. Google says that the chest freezer uses about 1kwh a day, the fridge freezer and the wine fridge are about 3kwh between them for each 24 hour period

Yes a fridge will use a lot more energy when it is being repeatedly opened which presumably it isn’t being at night.

It will also depend on how efficiently they are stacked/over filled, whether the seals are functioning efficiently and so on.

Ovens are big energy sappers, again it’s worth checking the seals. The wattage will help you estimate the cost.

And the washing machine. Is it an energy efficient model? Do you use hot or cold water?

Plasma screens will draw more power than more modern types, and of course the size of the screen is relevant too.

A desktop computer with a couple of screens will suck up a bit of power too whereas laptops are highly energy efficient running mostly on battery.

we have used 6kw today. W machine on once , dishwasher on once , toaster this morning , kettle , 2 fans on all night ( the day starts at midnight on our smart meter ). Radio on in garage all day and various power tools used on and off, afewother small things on. With all your extra computer stuff and extra fridges,tv and so I’d say 13 sounds about right. Try and get your smart Meter working.

I should say hifi on on garage 😀 not some little radio that uses about 20 watts per hour , So that probably used 1kw all day

That is a lot. We use about 8-9k a year, we are a family of 5 and don't have any gas, it's all electric including heating and hot water. However we managed to reduce our usage by 1500 kWh this year compared to last year, which is impressive as we now have an extra child!

The biggest change was avoiding using old electric storage heaters. We bought energy efficient electric heaters that plug in.

I think the other cause of our high usage is gaming computers, multiple, at least 2x on most of the day. I changed a setting on mine so that it hibernates instead of sleeping when I leave it idle. And we were using the oven multiple times to cook meals for different people, we have switched this to an air fryer which helped.

A gaming console, also left on most of the day to play YouTube for toddler (ridiculous) - changed this to a Google Chromecast and sold the console. Also much easier to turn off as it's voice controlled.

But in general anything that does heating and cooling are the high users of energy.

Heat pump dryers really don't use a lot. We got one about halfway into the year that we used 1500kwh less and used for almost all washes, so even with that increase we still reduced energy use overall. I did think that I am pretty much never rewashing now because it's so easy for me to just move stuff into the dryer, whereas previously if I missed a cue, it would quite frequently take me several days to get into the headspace to hang the washing up, and if washing has been left in the machine before hanging it smells musty so I was rewashing probably about one in every 5 washes, sometimes twice. So whether that was contributing to extra usage I don't know.

I need to have a look at this as our elec hills seem high year round. I don’t have (or want) a smart meter but will try to read the meter, assuming that is fairly straightforward and doesn’t involve some sort of computation as the gas does (converting to some other unit of measure)?

our average for the year is 5100, so 13 ish a day on avg. We both wfh and 2 kids with multiple devices. Still seems high though compared to some others on here.

in will also take note of usage whilst we are away , suspect the fridge is a big culprit. We have reduced oven usage, heat pump drier not been on since apr so I’m not sure where else to go.

@User952539 That’s a lot less though than 11000 per year which works out at around 30 kWh per day

We use just under 200 peak and just under 100 off peak per month, there are 3 of us in a 3 bed 1940's semi. We have no gas either so all cooking is electric but our heating runs on oil.

For 2021 we used 2618kwh for the year & wfh so almost always home.
We use less now as that was before the price rises.

That is just 2 of us.

So update at five to nine (dishwasher has been on again - kids off school, ds1 did some slow ironing for twenty minutes to do one top and a pair of jeans and the tv has been on) and we are showing 16.5kwh which is far more in line with what I’d have expected.