Energy detective
Ever since I learned that a 3 kWh a day lifestyle is achievable, I’ve been very curious as to our current usage. Since everything we have is electric (and much of the 3 kWh number is based on offloading things like heating to natural gas), I thought I’d have to wait until we actually moved.
Then I got this month’s electrical bill and realized that it’s about as good as it’ll get anywhere. We obviously didn’t use any heat this month but we also didn’t use much, if any, cooling. Given that, the only significant difference between here and the house is that here we have an electric stove. However, I think we use the stove for about half an hour a day (on average), which only adds up to 1 kWh a day, so that’s pretty easy to adjust for.
This month, we used 200 kWh over 28 days. That’s a little over 7 kWh (modified to 6 if we take off the electricity for the stove), which is about twice my eventual goal. That still seemed like a lot, so I decided to track down where all of that electricity is going.
Least surprising to me is that our refrigerator uses up to 3 kWh a day (50% of our presumptive housing number!). The refrigerator at the house only uses 2 kWh a day, which will help some as well. A new EnergyStar refrigerator can use as little as 1 kWh a day, so there’s room for improvement there as well.
So now we’re down to 3 kWh a day that are unaccounted for. The next things I thought of were basic appliances that we run intermittently, like the dishwasher, washer, and dryer. We haven’t used our dryer this month (hooray clotheslines!), but we wash dishes and clothes about once a week. That puts the dishwasher at about 0.3 kWh a day and the washing machine at 0.5 kWh a day. More efficient appliances would help some, but since we run them so infrequently, they’re not big culprits.
That puts us at 2.2 kWh a day that disappear into the unknown. I thought it might primarily be lighting, but that would be enough to run our lightbulbs for 110 hours a day, which seems unreasonable. It’s hard to estimate light usage, but I think we use about 24 light-hours a day (since mostly lights are off during the day and while we’re asleep and Maggie and I tend to stay in the same room and use one light in the evening). That’s only 0.1 kWh a day (thanks, CFLs!).
Not much of a change, but we’re down to 2.1 kWh. There are some other appliances that we use occasionally, like a microwave and clock radio, but they probably use less than a tenth of a kWh each, so that still only brings us down to 1.9 kWh. If we didn’t have most of our appliances on power strips, I’m sure that phantom power would increase this number considerably.
Oh, computers, of course. Maggie and I both have laptops. She uses hers about half an hour a day (at least, at home) and I leave mine on about 10.5 hours a day. With an average useage of 30 watts (based on 45 watts when in use and 10 watts hibernating), that comes out to a third of a kWh a day.
Well, 1.6 kWh is better but is still a lot of “black” energy. In fact, it’s 26% of our presumptive electrical use! If it takes you less than a day to figure out where that energy is going, you’ve got me beat. I’ll give you a minute to think about it.
Ready?
The culprit appears to be our hot water heater. It’s stuck in a closet and we never think about it except when it’s not working and yet it’s using half as much energy as a refrigerator! It would be even more except that Maggie and I use it infrequently (especially in the summer). The EnergyStar sticker on the side says that it’ll use 4773 kWh a year, which is over 13 kWh a day! Obviously, the sticker is way overestimating (and we’re using less hot water than the typical family), but that’s still a lot. Even though it’s “only” using 1.6 kWh or so now, when the weather is cooler and it has to work harder and more often, I bet it uses at least as much energy as our refrigerator (which will be working less hard in the winter, so this is about as bad as it should get).
A tankless water heater is looking better and better! A conservative estimate would put the tankless water heater at about half the electricity as an electric tank water heater. That still puts us well over 3 kWh a day, but add in a better refrigerator and we’re starting to get somewhere!
Lest you think Maggie is doing all the work herself, let me tell you about our new lawn mower. Until yesterday, I hadn’t mown a lawn since sixth grade, when my family moved to a house without a lawn. At that point, I used an ancient reel mower along with a rusty manual edger.
As Will said, we’re busy excavating the layers of wall material in our living room. The top layer was ugly wallpaper, the next layer was wood paneling, and now we’re down to plaster. (I actually don’t mind wood paneling since it covered the walls of my childhood bedroom but it’s not the most attractive thing in the world, especially when it has been coated in wallpaper paste and patched up randomly with non-matching pieces of wood.)
I apologize for the lack of a post last night. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I was asleep. It’s been a crazy couple of days, with work stress, the sleeping schedule that won’t regulate, and–oh yeah–we got a house and are slowly tearing it down.
We’ve had the house for less than 24 hours and I’m already psyched to pull off all the crazy textured wallpaper and rip up the carpet to reveal hardwood floors. Alas, it’s a lot of work! We spent several hours today pulling the top layer of wallpaper off the family room walls (the backing and paste tend to stay behind). A guy from Vectren came by to turn on the gas and told me that I should make my life simpler and buy a gallon of magical solution called Dif that supposedly takes wallpaper right off.
Maggie and I have been looking for 