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by swerling 3517 days ago
I've got an 80-year-old row house in Queens, NY. Family of 4, no pets.

Our electricity usage is well below yours. We don't make a huge effort to conserve, and I don't believe our house is particularly well insulated. We have no special energy tech, unless you count the LED lights. We have a lot of electronic gizmos sipping away at any given time.

Winter: we don't have the baseboard heaters, but I work from home most days and have an infrared heater pointed at my desk for a good 8 hrs or so each day.

Summer: my wife hates A/C when she sleeps, so we only have one air-conditioned room at night (me and 1 kid in the room w/ A/C, wife and other kid in the other). No pets, so we leave the A/C off when we're out, it comes back on (by timer) about an hour before we get home. So big difference in summer.

Still, that doesn't sem to account for all of the difference. I just checked my con-ed history online. Some typical usage numbers:

  Feb: 310 kWh  
  Apr: 240 kWh
  Jul: 410 kWh
  Sep: 270 kWh
We spend anywhere from $80-$350 a month for electricity. Maybe there's a big difference between an 80-year-old row and a 150-year-old row?

We have

- 3 window A/C units.

- 3 routers, running 24/7

- 2 servers (mostly used as NAS), running 24/7

- FireTV, a few sonos devices, drawing a bit 24/7

- Many lights, mostly LED. We're pretty good about turning them off.

- ~10-15 phones/kindles/laptops/tablets/gizmos constantly being topped off

- Gas for stove, water, and household heating

EDIT: After reading more discussion below, I thought maybe I'd made a mistake, since there is a difference between our usage and most of the other US folks. I double checked, and the numbers are right. Our total usage for the last 12 months is 4340 kWh. We were gone for a few weeks in the summer, else it would have been a bit higher.

1 comments

The GP had electric baseboard heat. That's a black hole for electricity usage purposes.