domestic solar panels.

[Raj]

Oh. Thanks KB then I should look into it. It’s a common 4 bed house and we don’t use 1 spare room. This 110KWH is daily average of electricity . I ll change energy provider. Same thing happened with my internet. I didn’t change it for 12 years n before changing the bill was 58£ only for internet

 

[GeekOKent]

110 a day, 40150 a year, and at the cheapest tariff you can get today that's about £1000 a month. Are you sure there isn't a decimal point missing somewhere ?

We have a 4 bed house, use the space entirely - and no gas, it's all electric only. Induction cooking and air source pump. We use 7500unit a year and are optimising down.

 

[AndyCook]

110kw daily is bonkers.
for March this year we used average 16kw per day. i think that’s too much, but my NAS server pulls a fair bit.
check wires from your house aren’t going to neighbours or a cannabis farm

 

[Bodie]

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/utilities/free-solar-panels/

Interesting that they say, on average, it's a 13 year payback!

 

[karl2000]

Where do you live? Buckingham Palace ?

If he lived there, he'd just send the bill to us

 

[StarCruiser]

Oh. Thanks KB then I should look into it. It’s a common 4 bed house and we don’t use 1 spare room. This 110KWH is daily average of electricity . I ll change energy provider. Same thing happened with my internet. I didn’t change it for 12 years n before changing the bill was 58£ only for internet

Raj, changing supplier won’t make much difference to your recorded consumption, except if your meter is not recording usage correctly as the new supplier will change the meter. I have an inherent distrust of smart meters but that’s by the by. 110kWh per day sounds a lot but it depends on what you have running and the consumption of each item. If you have ground-source heat pump heating and the inbuilt immersion heaters are cutting in then a 4 bed house could easily consume that amount or more (don’t get me started on GSHPs). It all depends on the consumption. If you wanted to send me a list of what you’re using, rating and times of use, I could estimate your consumption. While I write this the irony is not lost given the (ridiculous) advertising campaign for smart meters.

 

[StarCruiser]

I’m currently beginning to install battery Energy Storage Systems after setting up a test system with a colleague. We are using Victron kit with LiFePo4 cells giving a usable 8.3kWh system through a 4kW (continuous) inverter charger. Results on the test system have been good with consumption from the grid being pence per day over the standing charge (which is being increased BTW) with electric cooking, water heating and charging a Tesla. This is done mostly automatically with the rest manual fine tuning occasionally. The added benefit in this case is the supplier is Octopus Energy which offer day/night tariffs but also a half hour tariff in conjunction with a smart meter. This must be worked correctly utilising cheaper off peak periods where energy can be 6p per unit compared to 40p per unit peak.

I’ve encountered many stories of high energy bills with varying suppliers. One benefit with the Victron ESS is their online monitoring website which gives comprehensive information on consumption, solar generation (if monitored) and usage. Useful in verifying consumption.

 

[Raj]

We both work from home so all 12 radiators are on for 6-8 hrs a day. TV, 5 speakers, it’s receiver for 8 hrs. Apart from this it’s all regular things like 3 laptops, printer, office set up, fridge on daily basis. Cooking is less than average and all other household gadgets.
Have a tank in loft, in one bedroom and old school boiler. When I got this house it was there n working so didn’t bother to change

 

[StarCruiser]

Is your heating by gas boiler to the radiators Raj?

Do you have insulation in the loft?

 

[Towpack]

We're currently using 104kwh/day, 10 electric and 94 gas. That's in a 4 bedroom house with 3 people. I've replaced almost every bulb in the house with LED's including the 8ft flourescent tube in the kitchen with a LED tube. We have new "energy efficient" washing machine and tumble dryer. The dishwasher is around 30 years old and still working fine although I'm not sure where it is on the modern efficiency scale but it only gets used once a week on Sunday, if at all. We leave the usual suspects, like Sky TV box, router, CCTV etc on standby when not in use so, apart from sticking to the "switch it off" doctrine there's not much else we can do to reduce electric consumption. Given the upfront cost of Solar panels they wouldn't be that cost effective for us and just take too long to pay for themselves. The gas boiler is now 3 years old and way more efficient than the one it replaced but gas consumption still makes up the Lion's share of the bill. The energy bill has still increased by almost 90%.

 

[Raj]

boiler to the radiators Raj?

Yes it’s gas heating and loft is insulated. Is energy bill proportional to built-in area of the house.

 

[StarCruiser]

You can’t really work out whether consumption equals house size. It’s like saying is my car using too much fuel. The only way is to list out everything that gets used, it’s rating and for how long it’s on. Lighting is something that can take a lot to run if it’s standard filament lamps and on for long periods.

 

[frank rabbets]

Ok so you've got your money back in say 13 years but after that how much life is there left in the system?

 

[flint]

Things like inverters seem to be a consumable, the panels should be good for 25+ years if they're decent quality. Ignoring the ecological side of things (probably unwisely), I suppose it comes down to how much reliance you want to have on the National Grid as well as cost, which looks as though it's likely to keep going up. An independent source of power could be a pretty handy thing in the not too distant future, Expensive now with a battery bank, but might not seem so in a few years. A firm in Oxford (Leaders in perovskite solar technology | Oxford PV - [Leaving Land Cruiser Club]) are setting up a plant to make a panel which is supposed to be more efficient and apparently (hopefully!) cheaper, so progress is an ongoing thing.

 

[Towpack]

Some of the "plug and play" LED tubes are not quite so and the guy at the wholesalers said the fitting may require rewiring and this turned out to be the case. The tube I replaced in the kitchen was an 8 foot, 100w fluorescent but actually drew 160w. The 35w LED tube came with a dummy starter, was a straight swap, worked OK and is actually a tad brighter but was still drawing just over 110w so I had to rewire the fluorescent fitting to take out the lamp drive unit which was still powered up even though it isn't needed. Now drawing a tad over 35w . The kitchen light is used a lot so that's quite a saving.

 

[Raj]

Lighting

Agree, my dad always used to switch off lights n shout at us for leaving em on without purpose. They had 2 single solar lights since 1991.
It took 3 decades for me to realise why he was mad at us . Here in my house more than half of the lights are always on. Only now I am switching off lights

 

[Tractionman]

I used to take the bulbs out if my kids wouldnt turn lights in their rooms when not in there.
They would be on 24/7 for no reason other than they were lazy.
Now they have families of their own, they know why in their own words, I was " a miserable git"

 

[flint]

Handy chart for electricity use around the home:

This information is available as a freely downloadable PDF from this page

 

[Rob Cowell]

Unless your light bulbs were manufactured in the 1950s you'll probably find lights make almost no difference to your overall consumption.

In our house the cooker hob and grill seem to do most damage. Then oven, washing machine, and dishwasher. Tumble dryer would, but we make more and more effort not to use that, but if you live in Wales and have to have school uniforms ready sometimes that's unavoidable. Fridge and freezers definitely use a chunk but not much you can do about that. Lights seem to make almost no difference in the wider scheme of things. I still tut loudly when turning them off, of course.

 

[Towpack]

Well, every little helps, as they say. Going through the whole hose and fitting LED's certainly reduced our bills. When a standard filament bulbs draws around 7 times that of a LED equivelent it has to make a difference, especially in Winter with short daylight hours. We also have an electric cooker/grill which gets used 2, sometimes 3 times a week so that will certainly put a big hit on consumption. Most modern appliances that have a "standby" feature use switch mode power supplies so really do use very little when in said mode. We also updated our main freezer with a model that has a much higher efficiency rating. As said, all the little savings add up, the problem being they're dwarfed by the massive tariff increases in the last few months, increases almost unknown in living memory and it's just the start apparently.