2022 v 2021 Energy use

[DrFfybes]

As the other thread seems more generalised, I thought I'd put a comparison of the last couple of years' energy use.

Prompted in part by

German gas consumption is currently 40% down on the average for the time of year, helped in part by the warm weather but also reflecting a determined effort to save gas.

The previous year I replaced the bed and bathroom spots with LED, but the kitchen ones done this year were probably the main ones used. We also moved around so we were using the room at the South end of the house, which has a gas fire, rather thanthe "snug" which is actually the old cold store, and has a wood burner, but we often used the heating in the morning

The changes this year have been a new boiler without a pilot light, changing the rest of the lights (mainly 50W spots) to LED, replacing MrsF's fan heater in her office with a 35W heated seat and a hot water foot warmer (she didn't want one with wires as she'd trip over it), turning the stat to 13C from 15 (which we reckon reads 2 degrees under), and the much much milder weather.

We also got a dog (more washing machine use) and I got the workshop wired up, with 200W of LED lighting, so that easily eats a kWh if I'm in there tinkering for the afternoon.
Use is per day for the period 14-14th (roughly) of each month in kWh
2020 G: 86.7 E: 11.27
2021 G: 64.2 E: 11.06
2022 G: 22.8 E: 10.19

The electric is about as expected, the LED savings are replaced by more time in the workshop restoring an old bike.

But that gas use is 60% lower (albeit at 4x the price!), which I think is mainly down to the ambient temp just being at the tipping point between it being too cold for comfort. Bear in mind the summer use (for the hot water) was 17kWh/day in 2020 and 7kWh/day this August (the old boiler had a pilot light, and I bought a lagging jacket for the Cylinder this year)

Combining this with the hall stat being dropped a couple of degrees, the heating has barely come on at any time morning or evening. I tend to turn it up Tue and Thu mornings for 30 min as MrsF works from home and it takes the chill off her Northeast corner office, but the thing is we haven't actually been cold. OK, a couple of nights I've filled a hot water bottle, but only a couple. An electric blanket has been considered, but not acted on as it hasn't been cold going to bed without the heating.

So, are others also benefiting from this milder weather?

Paul

[daveh]

Year  kWh
1999	2061
2000	1900
2001	1506
2002	1357
2003	1346
2004	1522
2005	1606
2006	1809
2007	2269
2008	1971
2009	2148
2010	2259
2011	2322
2012	1478
2013	1590
2014	1886
2015	1886
2016	1700
2017	2067
2018	1693
2019	1860
2020	2326
2021	1458
2022	2131 estimated for November and December

There are two anomalous years. My meter broke in 2018 sometime in November, I noticed at the end of November and SSE replaced it early January. That meter broke in January 2021 (it only recorded energy when I was using high draw items like kettles and showers as far as I could see so was recording ~25 units a month instead of ~150-200 units/month). I reported it to OVO (with difficulty), I said I wasn't worried about covid as long as the engineer was masked and I would take suitable precautions myself, but they didn't fix it until May 21 when they fitted a smart meter (delay due to covid precautions as we were supposed to work from home if you could - I would have thought you can't fit meters wfh so it was perfectly acceptable to have come and fitted a new meter - any way their loss).

All electric house, except heat and hot water is from a wood burner in winter. I moved most of my lighting to LEF when I moved in and have been moving that to LED as the LEF bulbs failed (very infrequently).

[Itsallaguess]

So, are others also benefiting from this milder weather?

We've opened up all the radiators in the house now, but we've still managed to keep the central-heating automatic timing to it's 'basic running schedule' of 45 minutes at 6am and 45 minutes at 3pm, which warms the house up for people getting moving in the morning (and also dries the towels in the bathroom) and then also warms the house for when people start coming back in later in the day.

Over and above that, where people have been in of an evening, we've had the gas-fire on low in the main downstairs living area, which then also provides some low-level warmth to the rest of the house. I can imagine that situation continuing for a while yet, until the real colder weather starts to come in.

Between those times I'm at home fending for myself with my more personal warming options, which have been absolutely fine up to now, and especially my new heated gillet (https://tinyurl.com/2p84s64m) which is seeing lots of use in recent weeks on it's very lowest setting. I've got additional personal-comfort options that might come into play heading into the winter, but I'm managing absolutely fine up to now, and it'll have to get a lot colder yet before I need to consider anything more substantial.

One additional benefit of the relatively warmer weather so late in the year has meant that we've been able to keep use of our tumble dryer down to a minimum this year, helped by a real effort to use the clothes line on our lawn where it's been dry enough to do so, but also making sure that we've used our wall-mounted 'multi-arm' clothes line as often as possible as well this year.

On days where the lawn might be too soggy to want to go on, but where the weather's currently dry enough with a worthwhile breeze, then being able to get stuff out drying on the wall-mounted dryer whilst keeping to the rear patio area has been a real benefit in trying to keep the energy-hungry tumble-dryer in as little use as possible, and I think we've made big strides this year in doing so.

In terms of underlying energy usage, the main focus for me has been electricity, which is where the bulk of our home-energy requirements come from.

I don't have access to granular usage information unfortunately, so I've only really got very rough 'two-period' usage information to go on, as my available records only split usage into April to October, and October to April periods. I've been manually taking more granular readings in recent months, but that will take some time to feed through and be able to be more directly comparable.

What I can see is that my last October to April electricity usage can be calculated down to around 18 kwh per day over that previous 6 month winter period, and I can also see that my most recent weekly readings have a current electricity run-rate of around 11.5 kwh per day, so it will be interesting for me to see how both the next 6 month Oct/Apr period compares, as well as seeing how low I can maintain the daily electricity run-rate compared to the much higher daily average from the last winter period.

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[DrFfybes]

So, are others also benefiting from this milder weather?

We've opened up all the radiators in the house now, but we've still managed to keep the central-heating automatic timing to it's 'basic running schedule' of 45 minutes at 6am and 45 minutes at 3pm, which warms the house up for people getting moving in the morning (and also dries the towels in the bathroom) and then also warms the house for when people start coming back in later in the day.

Over and above that, where people have been in of an evening, we've had the gas-fire on low in the main downstairs living area, which then also provides some low-level warmth to the rest of the house. I can imagine that situation continuing for a while yet, until the real colder weather starts to come in.

We're in all day, but don't get up until 8:15, by which time we don't need the heating on in the morning

One additional benefit of the relatively warmer weather so late in the year has meant that we've been able to keep use of our tumble dryer down to a minimum this year, helped by a real effort to use the clothes line on our lawn where it's been dry enough to do so, but also making sure that we've used our wall-mounted 'multi-arm' clothes line as often as possible as well this year.

I've just used out tumble dryer for the first time this winter - 10 min to take the wetness out of some socks before putting them on the indoor airer. We had washing on the line yesterday but forgot to bring it in before it went dark, by which time it was all damp again. However I suspect our total annual tumble dryer use is under 5 hours. We have always used a large airer in a spare room, and a desk fan. In summer it works fine, in winter it is fine as the rad in there provides some heat, but at the moment it is a bit in limbo, as there isn't enough warmth n there to dry stuff even with circulating air.

2022 2131 estimated for November and December

Your energy use at 6-7kWh/day is extremely low, it is low even for someone who has gas.
Our 11kWh/day of electricity is pretty constant all year around. By 9am this morning we'd used 3kWh, which is the fish tank, fridge freezer, and a kettle of water. Annual figures wont demonstrate the effect of the mild weather, but how much wood do you use in winter and is it much reduced? I've noticed around here firewood prices are 50% up on last year.

Paul

[Dod101]

I have an oil fired boiler and a woodburner as well as electricity which is used for cooking, washing machine and dishwasher. I got rid of my dryer some time ago and now dry things in the utility room on a couple of racks. I am not on the gas grid.

My electricity consumption has come well down. In 2018 and 2019 it was around 4900 KWH each year. In 2020 and 2021 it was around 4500 KWH each year and for 2022 it will be around 3700 after I implemented some real care in usage and changed more lighting to LED, that is just over 10 KWH per day on average. I am aiming to get it under 10 if I can. But yes, I am down by about 20% and more like 25% from what used to be my usual usage which I regard as pretty good, I could reduce it more by not leaving things on standby but there comes a time.......

Dod

[88V8]

So far this year every month is lower than last year, even though I've done nothing until mid-summer to reduce our usage, and that was topping up loft insulation which we won't see much benefit from until we turn on all the heaters.

I only have records back a few years....

2018 - 11,016 kwh
2019 - 12,769
2020 - 15,764
2021 - 13,705
2022 - 10,500 est

We are all-electric as you may guess. Around 74% of our usage is on the night rate.

The heavy years included leaving fires on all day/night in the workshop for a couple of weeks when I was curing glue. Won't need to do that again. The uptick also reflected the fact that we effectively added a room by making a doorway through into what had been an outhouse.

We already have a lot of LED lighting, induction hob/pressure cooker, don't really have much scope for further savings although we are putting up curtains at three hard-to-curtain windows.

President P must be cursing the mild weather.

V8

[Itsallaguess]

As I said on my earlier post, until recently I only really have access to 6-monthly electricity usage figures, but I've now dug them out and below provide a rolling and overlapping two-period total that shows my electricity usage coming down quite considerably over the past few years -

Rolling two-period totals -

April 2020 to April 2021         5842 kwh
October 2020 to October 2021     5647 kwh
April 2021 to April 2022         5316 kwh
October 2021 to October 2022     5190 kwh

I work that out to be an 11.2% reduction in electricity usage from the first two-period reading to the last, and given my investment in additional personal-comfort items for this coming winter, I think I'll be seeing another rolling reduction next April.

Whilst we're on gas central heating, main living-space gas-fire, and gas hob, I think the scope for further saving on the gas front is relatively low, with the main benefit now going to be from me working at home with my personal-warmth items, and trying to keep the whole-house central heating off as much as possible whilst I'm in the house on my own. I did well at that last year, but I don't think there's much more margin to be gained on the gas front in all honesty.

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[daveh]

So far this year I've used a lot less wood than normal. I've only been lighting the fire (which does both water and radiators) in the evenings, normally at this time of year I'd also light it in the morning before going to work. I also turned the central heating on later in the year than usual (without the central heating on all the heat goes to the water unless the water temperature gets too high in which case the central heating pump comes on). I supply my own wood from wind blow or dying trees on a friend's farm.

[daveh]

I just went and measured the wood stack I'm working through at the moment and I've used about a cubic meter of stacked, dried, split logs. Mostly hard wood (elm) but the trees were long dead so some were a bit rotten, but dry, so some of their calorific value will have been lost. That's what's been used so far this burning season.