BullDog wrote:BullDog wrote:AF62 wrote:BullDog wrote:An aside. We have discovered that while we're asleep, we have a 0.5kw base load through the night (and day, obviously). This must be the refrigerator, the freezer and the wine cooler. So, running those is going to increase from 7p per hour to around 20p for 20 hours every day. Nothing we can do about that other than get rid of those three appliances. And that's not going to happen.
0.5kW seems quite high as that would be 12kWh a day.
When my house is unoccupied it uses around 4.4kWh a day which works out as a base load of around 0.18kW - I was away from mid Jan to mid March this year and I can see that the consumption for the whole of February was only 122.9kWh.
Unoccupied my house continues to run most things that are run whilst occupied (the fridge freezer, broadband, lighting, etc. - I keep the lighting, etc. running for security) so it is only the addition of washing machine, dishwasher, tv, and gas central heating pump that runs when I am home (plus obviously the EV charger).
I would be investing what is causing you such a high base load as that difference (0.5 vs 0.18) equates to over £1,000 a year.
Thanks for the thoughts. It's Mrs BD who gave me the overnight consumption from the display linked to the mains smart meter. You have me thinking, maybe either Mrs BD has made an error in what she's telling me, or I have misunderstood. Thanks again.
OK. Asked Mrs BD about the night time base load. From midnight to 6.00am this morning the display that's linked to the smart electric meter showed 3kw/hrs consumption. 0.5kw per hour. We have all less than a year old fridge, freezer, wine cooler plus a two PIR LED lights and two LED lights lit during dark hours. Plus a couple of alarm clocks etc... So the majority of the 0.5kw baseload has to be the three cooling appliances. I guess if you say each cooling appliance is around a 120w load and there's three of them running, it starts to make some sense. (The fridge and the freezer are both about 2m tall, they're quite large appliances). Thanks for the interest.
But are they going to have 120w load all the time?
Taking a couple of random examples - this tall fridge uses 116kWh a year, so 0.3kWh a day, so an average load of about 0.013kW - https://www.johnlewis.com/bosch-serie-4 ... e/p5123545
And this tall freezer uses 237kWh a year so 0.65kWh a day, so an average load of about 0.027kW - https://www.johnlewis.com/bosch-serie-4 ... e/p5135611
0.013kW plus 0.027kW is only 0.04kW (40w not 240w) so that's an awful lot of consumption by a wine cooler and a few LED lights to make up the other 0.46kW!