Tuesday 24 May 2016

Am I managing my electricity consumption well?


This is a chart of my domestic  electricity consumption for a fairly typical mid-winter weekday , Tuesday 9th February 2016.
Technically the chart is net consumption after PV generation, but in mid February my 4kW system will generate negligible energy.

My observations are:


  • I have 6kW of storage heaters which come on at midnight.  I am pleased to see that they only remained on initially for less than an hour. They appear to come on again sporadically through the night when they are on a low setting.
  • I seem to use some electricity at 8-10am for breakfast and probably cups of tea.
  • My consumption is then low until 7-8pm when cooking the evening meal starts
  • At 8pm the time switch on my immersion heater comes on
  • Later in the evening I have a bath and the immersion heater comes on again.
  • I wonder if the clock in the Owl monitor was accurately set - perhaps the consumption around 11-12pm is in fact the storage heaters coming on again. it would also make sense for the breakfast blip to be a bit earlier.
Anyway the main thing that please me is that consumption at the peak time around 3-7pm has been kept low. it would be even better if I could extend this until 8pm, but nobody is perfect. 

Not every day was as "good" as this, but at least I have some idea of what is happening.
The device I use is an Owl USB monitor which costs about £40.

Any comments?
Do you monitor your personal domestic consumption?

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