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by ux-app 3206 days ago
>Do you have electric heat?

nope gas heating. and it's a modest 3 BR home.

according to this[1] Australian Government website about energy usage, for 3 people in my postcode (5075), no pool + mains gas, average daily consumption is 15.8 kWh, which matches almost exactly my last bill (avg was 15.3kWh).

I think some people are underestimating their usage. We're definitely not a wasteful household, we don't run the drier much, appliances are off when not in use, lights off when no one in room etc.

>If not you should probably spend twenty bucks on a kill-a-watt clone and check which of your appliances is consuming several hundred watts all day

yup already did that a couple years ago. Turns out there are no unusually bad appliances in the house.

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[1] - https://www.energymadeeasy.gov.au/benchmark

1 comments

Then what appliance uses all that electricity? I'm really curios!
nothing out of the ordinary I think. 2 computers on for about 8 hours/day. Dishwasher, TV on for 2 hours/day. iPad, home lighting.

I think some people in this thread are severely underestimating their energy usage. I wonder if people are just ballparking their estimates based on some rough data from years ago or if they're actually looking at last month's bill when saying they're using < 100kWh in a month.

Maybe for a single person who is never home that would be reasonable, but I can't imagine families being able to survive on so little.

edit: so this was driving me a little crazy and so I had to do some extra digging. My guess is that people not aware of their true usage. According to this [1], the average US household uses > 900kWh of energy/month. We're at half that so clearly not going overboard.

[1] - http://insideenergy.org/2014/05/22/using-energy-how-much-ele...