Ask Lemmy

Yeah, something seems off - that seems high. For context I’m in NW Oregon and the screenshots show my last month of usage (by day,) as well as the last year (by month.)

We have a single-story home, 1500 square feet. 2 adults but we’ve had some guests this month. Everything is fully electric. Heat pump, resistive heating, water heater, stove, etc. are all electric. I take long showers and prefer keeping the house comfortable so we use the heating and cooling a lot. We also have an electric car.

Our home was built in the 80s and is very poorly insulated. It’s also leaky. We had an energy use audit/home efficiency audit done and the report showed that we had the equivalent of a 16x16” window open at all times. We’ve done some work to fill gaps, blow in insulation in the upper crawl space, etc. so it is likely a little better now. Our floor is uninsulated but it would be very costly to add insulation, and we would then need to also insulate our pipes so they don’t freeze. Our furnace/fan stack is in the garage, which is even more poorly insulated and so we lose a lot of heat to the garage before it makes its way to the house.

We have a smart thermostat and use time-of-day billing which is more expensive during peak hours (5 to 9 pm), roughly the same price as normal billing during the other daytime hours (morning to 5pm) and half price overnight. The car only charges overnight and the thermostat will try to heat or cool the house before 5 pm if it can.

The daily spikes above our baseline usage are from days when I drove a lot and thus needed to recharge the car after using nearly the whole battery up, vs most days when I only need to add 17-20% from my commute.

You mentioned that you do not have electric heating as your primary heat source, nor do you have an electric water heater. I assume no electric car either. You mentioned being in Western Canada, so it’s very likely colder than where I live. Your usage seems really high. If it was just the total bill being high I would guess that you’ve got an electric company with high rates per kWh, but that isn’t the primary issue here.

For some additional context, a daily usage of 80 kWh would charge my car’s battery from 0 to 91%. That would give roughly 280 miles of range. It’s the equivalent of 2.37 gallons of gasoline, if the gas can be used completely efficiently (e.g. not like in a car where a very large portion of the energy is lost to heat.) 1 gallon is equivalent to 33.7 kWh. Your usage is a lot of energy.

I’m on mobile so can’t see all of the comments and responses while I’m typing here, so I apologize if these things have already been covered. These are the things I wonder about, in no particular order.

• Is the usage history/screenshot you shared from your usage, or is that from when the previous owner was in the house? If it’s the previous owner’s usage, I probably wouldn’t worry too much just yet because you don’t know how your usage will compare. I also wouldn’t jump immediately to make large changes to your behaviors - just use things normally for a few months to see how your usage looks under normal circumstances. Then you can make informed decisions.
• How much does the usage change month to month over the course of the year, and how does that correlate with outside temperature? Heating and cooling will naturally cost more as the temperature differential increases - for your location I am guessing the indoor-outdoor differential is bigger in winter. I know you said your primary heat source is gas, but you did mention an electric heater.
• What kind of electric heater is it and how often does it run? Electric/resistive heating can be quite energy energy-intensive. Perhaps it has a label indicating how many Watts it uses, so you could calculate the theoretical maximum (k)Wh it would use in a day if it ran constantly, and check to see how much of the daily usage that could account for. Most plug in ones are 1500 Watts, so that’s 1.5 kiloWatts per hour or 36 kWh per day, which is quite a lot and could account for a big part of the usage, if it is running often.
• How old is your home, and how large is it? What is the insulation like, and is it drafty? Where is the electric heater - in the house or not? Is that space drafty, and what is the insulation like? If it’s drafty and/or poorly insulated, the electric heater is fighting a battle that it’s constantly losing. Since your primary heat is gas, we can kind of ignore that part, but I assume your air conditioning uses electricity. Does energy usage go up a lot when the air conditioner would be used? Is your AC having to work harder because of a lack of insulation or your home not being sealed well?
• How tall are the ceilings? This can be related. High ceilings and those cavernous “great rooms” that were/are popular can make heating and cooling costs go up quite a bit because you have a lot more air to deal with, and depending on the layout of rooms and air ducts/vents, you may be sending freshly heated or cooled air into areas where it isn’t mixing well, is stagnant, or pools in the high ceiling areas instead of the areas humans actually occupy. Perhaps a ceiling fan or strategic changes to vents could help.
• I would strongly consider using a usage testing device like other comments mentioned. I don’t know much about how they work but my understanding is that you could go circuit by circuit to see where the electricity is going. I would suggest checking each circuit for an extended period of time, like a whole day, before moving on to the next one.
• You could also get a device like a Kill-a-Watt, which is plugged into an outlet. You then plug something into the outlet on the K-a-W itself, and you can see how much energy it is using over a period of time. If your electric heater is a plug-in type, I’d strongly suggest doing this - especially if it’s the kind of heater that would switch itself on and off with a thermostat. Otherwise you would have to be next to the heater all day to see if it’s running almost constantly or not.
• You mentioned some sort of outbuilding with its own electric panel, which will obviously need to be investigated as well in the same manner.
• Perhaps you’ve already done this - walk around both the outbuilding and your home to look for extension cords in exterior outlets. If you find one, where does it go? It’s possible you’ve got a neighbor helping themselves via an extension cord. Also check the property for other exterior outlets. Sometimes folks may have run power underground to an outlet that’s somewhere outdoors, maybe in a ground-level or sunken box, or on a post?
• I’m assuming these don’t apply to you, but are there other outdoor things using power? Heated driveway or walking paths? Those can be nice in places with snowy winters and perhaps could be configured wrong and might be running when they shouldn’t. Outdoor lights? A pond or pool or hot tub with pumps? Is the well pump constantly running? I can’t imagine it would use a lot of electricity under normal usage but don’t think they’re supposed to run constantly.
• This probably should go up higher on the list, but I would strongly recommend finding a local company to come and perform an energy/efficiency audit. I believe we paid around $500 USD for ours. It was extremely informative. We were given infrared photos of leaky/poorly insulated spots, specific details about our appliances and their usage, recommendations for remediation and estimated costs, etc.