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I’m always astounded by other people’s electricity consumption. How does this person use over 50kWh per day? That’s almost as much as I use per month! Do aircon

I’m always astounded by other people’s electricity consumption. How does this person use over 50kWh per day? That’s almost as much as I use per month! Do aircons use that much power?

wordofx 2y ago
Per month? Do you live by yourself and not have a computer or cook at home? With 3 kids and winter time for heaters I’m using ~44/day average. ~26/day during summer.
- punnerud 2y ago
  Around 2300kWh/months during winter in Norway and 1000 in the summer here.
  - wordofx 2y ago
    That’s about 76/day so that makes sense for heating. Must be super cold :D
- Yoric 2y ago
  For what it's worth, my peak month this year was March at 169 kWh / month. I cook (electric) almost every day, I have a kid and I work mostly from home. Half of that energy is the (oversized) water heater. My winter months were actually a bit lower, but there's collective heating in my building, so that biases my consumption. That's in Paris, France.
  - wordofx 2y ago
    When I lived in an apartment in Australia, during winter we didn’t use the heater because it wasn’t so cold, when we moved to a landed house we couldn’t live without the heater! I don’t have any power bills from 20 years ago to know how much we used. But you’ve made me curious.
    - Yoric 2y ago
      Yeah, in Paris, for the last few years, in my flat, I have turned the heating maybe 2-3 days per winter.
- ben_w 2y ago
  50kWh/month is 68 watts; if there's no AC and if heating and cooking is non-electric, I can easily believe that. Even a bit of microwave use won't eat much into that budget, as it's going to be 6-12 minutes per day at 1 kW, or an average of 4-8 watts. Heating is the much harder one to find electric solutions for, but I'm sure there are plenty of examples of the right combination of temperate climates and good insulation/insolation design for that.
- flakeoil 2y ago
  1000kwh/month in the winter and 350kwh in the summer. 4 people in central Europe. We use electricity for heating the house, warm water and everything else. We have an air-to-water heat pump.
PunchTornado 2y ago
I don't get it either. Maybe they are training LLMs. We're a family of 4 and we use ~90kWh per month. No difference winter/summer because we have gas heating. Maybe that's where the difference goes.
- whiplash451 2y ago
  They say they convert their gas heater into the equivalent in electricity. They also say they consume 177kWh in a summer month which amounts to more than 50kWh per day.
  - cuu508 2y ago
    177kWh/mo is 5.9kWh/day
    - whiplash451 2y ago
      You’re right! My bad :)
- IshKebab 2y ago
  That's extremely low tbf. We're the same and use around 10 kWh/day. The average use per household in the UK is 7 kWh/day. I'm really curious what people's base load is though. Mine is about 300W which seems very high and I can't figure out what would be using all that power. I guess we have 3 routers, an American style fridge and a Quooker tap, but even so... feels like it should be half that. Guess I need to go around with a power meter.
  - Yoric 2y ago
    FWIW, in my house, ~50% of the electricity is used by the electric water heater. This feels like lots of waste, given that we take at most 30 minutes of shower per day.
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    From the dates when we've been away from the house, ours is around 140 W. That's with a router and 4-bay NAS, a fridge, and whatever else is on standby mode (TV, microwave etc)
PaulKeeble 2y ago
Aircon really does use a lot of power. Heating and cooling is the largest use of power in most western households. USA households use substantially more power than most nations, less efficiency focuses in goods and a lot of Aircon.
whiplash451 2y ago
Indeed. But that’s « only » 2kW constantly which makes sense if they leave AC 24/7 (that’s a reasonable assumption for a summer in DC) and the house isolation is not amazing (which unfortunately is the case with many houses in the US).
krsdcbl 2y ago
Same, i struggle to find a good explanation. 50 a month is definitely pretty low as well for where i come from, but the median for a family of four would still be around 20-25% of the numbers reported in the article. A couple consuming 1/6 of those 58kWh would be on the higher end. (Austria)
- whiterock 2y ago
  Also (Austria) - I live in a shared appartment in Vienna - We cook a lot, consumed about 1800kWh for the year, so 150kWh a month or 5kWh a day. 50kWh a day certainly seems Insane, but then again we have no AC.
  - mkayokay 2y ago
    A lot of places in Austria (esp. Vienna) are heated with burner Technology (gas/oil/pellets). The article states that this energy usage has been converted and is included in the total amount. A quick search indicates that 1kg of pellets generates ~5kwh. So when burning 4to. of pellets in winter that adds about roughly 50kwh per day. When using burner tech to heat, a good way to reduce the cost and profit from pv is to add a heating rod in the buffer tank of the heating system.
    - whiterock 2y ago
      thx!
gddgb 2y ago
[dead]
szvsw 2y ago
They do indeed. For instance, Singapore uses the most energy per capita in the world (or top 3-4 depending on year)… and it’s mostly due to AC. Even with very high coefficients of performance (usually in the 2-4 range, meaning you can remove 2kWh-4kWh of thermal energy from a space with just a single kWh of electricity - remember ACs act as heat pumps essentially leveraging the refrigeration cycle), ACs are still total electricity hogs. Believe it or not, air conditioning systems sometimes even have to reheat the air! Sometimes you have to make the air much colder than desired just to dehumidify the air, and then you must reheat it to get it back to a reasonable temperature. There are some cool innovations in alternatives that don’t rely on all this psychrometric chart hacking, like using membranes and dissidents to perform the dehumidification, or using direct/indirect evaporative cooling etc etc. Edit: oh and of course space conditioning demands go up pretty linearly with total volume of air, which is in turn linear with total floor area. So could also just be a big home.
- flakeoil 2y ago
  And I have seen people use mobile air conditioners without properly leading out the warm air that is created out of the building so they basically have a closed loop where the aircon fights itself. And even when properly letting out the warm air, new warm air from the outside is sucked in. Typically these types of air conditioners are just plain useless except for cooling one person who sits in the cool air blow. It's also amazing how so many houses in warm countries are so poorly isolated and have bad window screens to avoid the sun heat up the inside of the building.
- Leherenn 2y ago
  Not to say they don't use a lot of AC/energy, but Singapore's per capita numbers are a bit biased by the 300k+ daily commuters from Malaysia.
- ekianjo 2y ago
  Singapore tends to set the AC systems to super cool temperatures which makes them consume even more.
haizhung 2y ago
At the same time, the generated electricity also seems insane to me. We live in a complex with 84 units, each with a solar roof, outputting about 12 kWh per unit per day. Maybe the owner just has a massive house, as they are outputting about 5x as much as our 2024 solar panel models …
- szvsw 2y ago
  Where do you live? What latitude? That can have a big impact. Also note that the publication was 2021, not 2011 (typo by parent)
  - haizhung 2y ago
    About 52.5 deg north. How much difference can that make?
    - szvsw 2y ago
      It can definitely make a big difference. DC’s latitude is 38 degrees. That’s about the same gap to Miami (25 degrees). Think about shining a flashlight perpendicular to the ground vs at an angle. Beyond the dynamics of direct irradiance, there’s also weather to consider- if you live in a significantly cloudier area (which might be possible, assuming you live in Canada or Germany/netherlands/etc based off that latitude), that will obviously affect output. And then there is also things like building-to-building shading, in case you live in a dense area… lots of things can affect this kind of calculation. Try playing around with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s PVWatts calculator: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php
muppetman 2y ago
We live where we have to provide our own water pressure. So everytime we turn the tap on a 2400watt pump kicks in. We have 3 fridges, two normals ones and a mini fridge my homebrew lives in. We have pool, which needs it's 2400watt pump to run for at least two hours a day. We have 3 air-conditioning units (not counting the forth we have that can heat the pool), it's Winter in New Zealand so we run them most nights. We have 4 computers on pretty much all the time. We have a condenser tumble dryer we use quite regularly. We are a family of four, our hot water is electric. My daughter spends years in there (which is also using that water pump...) The big ticket items are the two pumps, the hot water, the fridges and the aircon units. We also have electric heaters going in Winter. It all adds up. We do 50kwh a day quite often. Sometimes 80 in summer when all the aircons are on and the pool heatpump is too.
- thedrbrian 2y ago
  >summer >pool heat pump Wait why are you running a heat pump for the pool in the summer?
- ZenMaxe 2y ago
  [dead]
- xandrius 2y ago
  Well, your setup is absolutely full of luxuries. Most people don't have 4x computers running all day, 3x fridges and a (heated) pool. Together lifestyle choices. And then yes, you need to provide your own water pressure too.
  - muppetman 2y ago
    Totally. We are extremely fortunate to have these things. That said, I still think even with the unnecessary fluff taken out, if you're heating your hot water with electricity you'll be using a lot of kWh.
- mkayokay 2y ago
  When I visited the southern island of NZ in 2019 I was shocked how little insulated the houses I stayed in were, considering that the winters are quite cold. For example, most windows only had 1 pane tech. Whereas here in Europe modern windows use 3 panes for better insulation and sound filtering.
55555 2y ago
In the USA, 50% of energy consumption in homes is heating & cooling.
sandreas 2y ago
The aircons are far more efficient these days, but in mostly wooden hardly insulated houses often built in the US the costs are way higher. A fully running aircon for a single room pulls around 1kw per hour, while it usually runs about 15 mins per hour in an efficient environments, depending in temps, humidity and insulation. Not speaking oft a whole house...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rafaelmn 2y ago
Electric car could be a big chunk of that.
rojeee 2y ago
I have 6.5kW of solar PV and a 16kWh battery system in the UK. On a sunny day I’ll generate about 50kWh and export more than half of that to the grid. The rest is for charging my hybrid car (25kWh) and just general house use. So far this year, our net grid import is 3000kWh and solar generation is 2500kWh. We have a 5kW heat pump and that uses quite a lot of electricity in winter when we don’t generate too much.
- nextweek2 2y ago
  I have gone off the idea of solar at home. I’m on the octopus agile tariff where there are changing prices every 30 minutes. Given that sometimes I am paid to use electricity it would seem better to just buy a battery system and offset the usage. Especially in the winter months when it’s blowing but not sunny. But I don’t see people selling this setup.
globular-toast 2y ago
It is indeed insane. It's amazing and scary what people can think is "normal". This person saves 3k credits per year on electricity. That's 3x the price of my entire year of energy and I'm sure the unit cost where I live (the UK) is higher. I pay attention to how much energy I use. Resist putting the heating on etc. While other people are leaving a footprint 10x as big and thinking nothing of it.
kalleboo 2y ago
Our lowest consumption months (when the weather is nice) are 300 kWh/mo (10 kWh/day), and our highest are 900 kWh/mo (30 kWh/day), all depending on the heating and cooling needs. And this not counting cooking or hot water (which use gas)

I’m always astounded by other people’s electricity consumption. How does this person use over 50kWh per day? That’s almost as much as I use per month! Do aircons use that much power?

wordofx 2y ago

Per month? Do you live by yourself and not have a computer or cook at home? With 3 kids and winter time for heaters I’m using ~44/day average. ~26/day during summer.

punnerud 2y ago
Around 2300kWh/months during winter in Norway and 1000 in the summer here.
- wordofx 2y ago
  That’s about 76/day so that makes sense for heating. Must be super cold :D
Yoric 2y ago
For what it's worth, my peak month this year was March at 169 kWh / month. I cook (electric) almost every day, I have a kid and I work mostly from home. Half of that energy is the (oversized) water heater. My winter months were actually a bit lower, but there's collective heating in my building, so that biases my consumption. That's in Paris, France.
- wordofx 2y ago
  When I lived in an apartment in Australia, during winter we didn’t use the heater because it wasn’t so cold, when we moved to a landed house we couldn’t live without the heater! I don’t have any power bills from 20 years ago to know how much we used. But you’ve made me curious.
  - Yoric 2y ago
    Yeah, in Paris, for the last few years, in my flat, I have turned the heating maybe 2-3 days per winter.
ben_w 2y ago
50kWh/month is 68 watts; if there's no AC and if heating and cooking is non-electric, I can easily believe that. Even a bit of microwave use won't eat much into that budget, as it's going to be 6-12 minutes per day at 1 kW, or an average of 4-8 watts. Heating is the much harder one to find electric solutions for, but I'm sure there are plenty of examples of the right combination of temperate climates and good insulation/insolation design for that.
flakeoil 2y ago
1000kwh/month in the winter and 350kwh in the summer. 4 people in central Europe. We use electricity for heating the house, warm water and everything else. We have an air-to-water heat pump.

PunchTornado 2y ago

I don't get it either. Maybe they are training LLMs. We're a family of 4 and we use ~90kWh per month. No difference winter/summer because we have gas heating. Maybe that's where the difference goes.

whiplash451 2y ago
They say they convert their gas heater into the equivalent in electricity. They also say they consume 177kWh in a summer month which amounts to more than 50kWh per day.
- cuu508 2y ago
  177kWh/mo is 5.9kWh/day
  - whiplash451 2y ago
    You’re right! My bad :)
IshKebab 2y ago
That's extremely low tbf. We're the same and use around 10 kWh/day. The average use per household in the UK is 7 kWh/day. I'm really curious what people's base load is though. Mine is about 300W which seems very high and I can't figure out what would be using all that power. I guess we have 3 routers, an American style fridge and a Quooker tap, but even so... feels like it should be half that. Guess I need to go around with a power meter.
- Yoric 2y ago
  FWIW, in my house, ~50% of the electricity is used by the electric water heater. This feels like lots of waste, given that we take at most 30 minutes of shower per day.
- kalleboo 2y ago
  From the dates when we've been away from the house, ours is around 140 W. That's with a router and 4-bay NAS, a fridge, and whatever else is on standby mode (TV, microwave etc)

PaulKeeble 2y ago

Aircon really does use a lot of power. Heating and cooling is the largest use of power in most western households. USA households use substantially more power than most nations, less efficiency focuses in goods and a lot of Aircon.

whiplash451 2y ago

Indeed. But that’s « only » 2kW constantly which makes sense if they leave AC 24/7 (that’s a reasonable assumption for a summer in DC) and the house isolation is not amazing (which unfortunately is the case with many houses in the US).

krsdcbl 2y ago

Same, i struggle to find a good explanation. 50 a month is definitely pretty low as well for where i come from, but the median for a family of four would still be around 20-25% of the numbers reported in the article. A couple consuming 1/6 of those 58kWh would be on the higher end. (Austria)

whiterock 2y ago
Also (Austria) - I live in a shared appartment in Vienna - We cook a lot, consumed about 1800kWh for the year, so 150kWh a month or 5kWh a day. 50kWh a day certainly seems Insane, but then again we have no AC.
- mkayokay 2y ago
  A lot of places in Austria (esp. Vienna) are heated with burner Technology (gas/oil/pellets). The article states that this energy usage has been converted and is included in the total amount. A quick search indicates that 1kg of pellets generates ~5kwh. So when burning 4to. of pellets in winter that adds about roughly 50kwh per day. When using burner tech to heat, a good way to reduce the cost and profit from pv is to add a heating rod in the buffer tank of the heating system.
  - whiterock 2y ago
    thx!

gddgb 2y ago

[dead]

szvsw 2y ago

They do indeed. For instance, Singapore uses the most energy per capita in the world (or top 3-4 depending on year)… and it’s mostly due to AC. Even with very high coefficients of performance (usually in the 2-4 range, meaning you can remove 2kWh-4kWh of thermal energy from a space with just a single kWh of electricity - remember ACs act as heat pumps essentially leveraging the refrigeration cycle), ACs are still total electricity hogs. Believe it or not, air conditioning systems sometimes even have to reheat the air! Sometimes you have to make the air much colder than desired just to dehumidify the air, and then you must reheat it to get it back to a reasonable temperature. There are some cool innovations in alternatives that don’t rely on all this psychrometric chart hacking, like using membranes and dissidents to perform the dehumidification, or using direct/indirect evaporative cooling etc etc. Edit: oh and of course space conditioning demands go up pretty linearly with total volume of air, which is in turn linear with total floor area. So could also just be a big home.

flakeoil 2y ago
And I have seen people use mobile air conditioners without properly leading out the warm air that is created out of the building so they basically have a closed loop where the aircon fights itself. And even when properly letting out the warm air, new warm air from the outside is sucked in. Typically these types of air conditioners are just plain useless except for cooling one person who sits in the cool air blow. It's also amazing how so many houses in warm countries are so poorly isolated and have bad window screens to avoid the sun heat up the inside of the building.
Leherenn 2y ago
Not to say they don't use a lot of AC/energy, but Singapore's per capita numbers are a bit biased by the 300k+ daily commuters from Malaysia.
ekianjo 2y ago
Singapore tends to set the AC systems to super cool temperatures which makes them consume even more.

haizhung 2y ago

At the same time, the generated electricity also seems insane to me. We live in a complex with 84 units, each with a solar roof, outputting about 12 kWh per unit per day. Maybe the owner just has a massive house, as they are outputting about 5x as much as our 2024 solar panel models …

szvsw 2y ago
Where do you live? What latitude? That can have a big impact. Also note that the publication was 2021, not 2011 (typo by parent)
- haizhung 2y ago
  About 52.5 deg north. How much difference can that make?
  - szvsw 2y ago
    It can definitely make a big difference. DC’s latitude is 38 degrees. That’s about the same gap to Miami (25 degrees). Think about shining a flashlight perpendicular to the ground vs at an angle. Beyond the dynamics of direct irradiance, there’s also weather to consider- if you live in a significantly cloudier area (which might be possible, assuming you live in Canada or Germany/netherlands/etc based off that latitude), that will obviously affect output. And then there is also things like building-to-building shading, in case you live in a dense area… lots of things can affect this kind of calculation. Try playing around with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s PVWatts calculator: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php

muppetman 2y ago

We live where we have to provide our own water pressure. So everytime we turn the tap on a 2400watt pump kicks in. We have 3 fridges, two normals ones and a mini fridge my homebrew lives in. We have pool, which needs it's 2400watt pump to run for at least two hours a day. We have 3 air-conditioning units (not counting the forth we have that can heat the pool), it's Winter in New Zealand so we run them most nights. We have 4 computers on pretty much all the time. We have a condenser tumble dryer we use quite regularly. We are a family of four, our hot water is electric. My daughter spends years in there (which is also using that water pump...) The big ticket items are the two pumps, the hot water, the fridges and the aircon units. We also have electric heaters going in Winter. It all adds up. We do 50kwh a day quite often. Sometimes 80 in summer when all the aircons are on and the pool heatpump is too.

thedrbrian 2y ago
>summer >pool heat pump Wait why are you running a heat pump for the pool in the summer?
ZenMaxe 2y ago
[dead]
xandrius 2y ago
Well, your setup is absolutely full of luxuries. Most people don't have 4x computers running all day, 3x fridges and a (heated) pool. Together lifestyle choices. And then yes, you need to provide your own water pressure too.
- muppetman 2y ago
  Totally. We are extremely fortunate to have these things. That said, I still think even with the unnecessary fluff taken out, if you're heating your hot water with electricity you'll be using a lot of kWh.
mkayokay 2y ago
When I visited the southern island of NZ in 2019 I was shocked how little insulated the houses I stayed in were, considering that the winters are quite cold. For example, most windows only had 1 pane tech. Whereas here in Europe modern windows use 3 panes for better insulation and sound filtering.

55555 2y ago

In the USA, 50% of energy consumption in homes is heating & cooling.

sandreas 2y ago

The aircons are far more efficient these days, but in mostly wooden hardly insulated houses often built in the US the costs are way higher. A fully running aircon for a single room pulls around 1kw per hour, while it usually runs about 15 mins per hour in an efficient environments, depending in temps, humidity and insulation. Not speaking oft a whole house...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

rafaelmn 2y ago

Electric car could be a big chunk of that.

rojeee 2y ago

I have 6.5kW of solar PV and a 16kWh battery system in the UK. On a sunny day I’ll generate about 50kWh and export more than half of that to the grid. The rest is for charging my hybrid car (25kWh) and just general house use. So far this year, our net grid import is 3000kWh and solar generation is 2500kWh. We have a 5kW heat pump and that uses quite a lot of electricity in winter when we don’t generate too much.

nextweek2 2y ago
I have gone off the idea of solar at home. I’m on the octopus agile tariff where there are changing prices every 30 minutes. Given that sometimes I am paid to use electricity it would seem better to just buy a battery system and offset the usage. Especially in the winter months when it’s blowing but not sunny. But I don’t see people selling this setup.

globular-toast 2y ago

It is indeed insane. It's amazing and scary what people can think is "normal". This person saves 3k credits per year on electricity. That's 3x the price of my entire year of energy and I'm sure the unit cost where I live (the UK) is higher. I pay attention to how much energy I use. Resist putting the heating on etc. While other people are leaving a footprint 10x as big and thinking nothing of it.

kalleboo 2y ago

Our lowest consumption months (when the weather is nice) are 300 kWh/mo (10 kWh/day), and our highest are 900 kWh/mo (30 kWh/day), all depending on the heating and cooling needs. And this not counting cooking or hot water (which use gas)