I posted a video on LinkedIn of how we’ve saved a huge amount of electricity and also carbon footprint. Thought it might be of interest given the energy crisis.
Happy to answer questions etc.
It would be interesting to see some extra data:
- how much was the power consumption in 2021?
- what’s the size of the house?
- how many people are living in there and what’s their approximate age?
- what’s the heating power source?
For example, my family (2 adults, one 3 year old and a baby born almost in the last trimester) consumed about 3 MWh of power throughout 2021 (~8.1 kWh per day). The apartment is approx. 84 m², we’re cooking with electricity and heating is not included. Throughout a 10 day vacation the empty apartment consumed almost 3 kWh per day.
It feels like you could greatly reduce the power consumption by other means (at least two are obvious from the video):
- no towel rack heating
- absolutely no clothes drier
- cooking with latent heat
…of course, these would somehow reduce the comfort.
PS: what energy measuring smart plugs are you using?
Live tracking had the same effect on our household. We’ve got rid of some of the power hungry items we owned (50" plasma TV - basically a radiator with the added bonus of showing moving pictures!) which has brought our usage down. Switching to a single freezer as well.
Also turning the brightness down on the laptop/monitor (I work from home) made a huge difference, taking the office usage from about 180-200w down to 66-90w.
Automating the lighting do detect presence again has made savings. Also we don’t use the oven much any more (used to be daily). It’s little things but we’ve gone from around £220pcm to £110pcm. That also includes charging the PHEV daily - the largest pull on the grid.
I live in a 3 bedroom stone cottage built in 1662 - so automating it was a bit of a challenge (you can’t drill through the walls or hide cables etc.). I’ll never go back to an inefficient non-smart house!
Here’s our “always” visible power monitoring (the daily/monthly cost includes gas/electric and standing charges). We are using a Shelly EM for the real time power usage. Also track individual devices using a variety of smart plugs.
