[noroot]

I'm intrigued by your number. That's less then 1000 kWh per year. Given that you say you do use 'modern appliances' like dishwasher and a washing machine it seems extremely low.

I have a fairly small house, with only 2 adults, that's full electric (appliances, cooking, hot water, heating). We have a dishwasher (used every other day) and we also use a washing machine (and sadly often the heat pump dryer because there is no space for a drying rack).

We use, all in, about 4000 kWh/year. About 750 to 1000 of that is for heating the house and hot water. My idle usage is higher then your average, which is somewhat crazy. I have about 30-40W for the ventilation system, about 20W for modem/router/wap, 10W for home server and the rest is for fridge/freezer I guess.

Even just cooking on the induction hob, or using the (electric oven) will already blow your entire day budget. Let alone a dishwasher or washing machine cycle.

I'm fully aware that the biggest improvement can be made in being aware of your usage (which I am, I monitor it carefully) and try to be more mindful about it. Yet it's not easy to lower the numbers significant.

Some years ago, as a single, I also was (well) below 1000 kWh/year. But that was without a dishwasher, or dryer. And generally cooking less often/fancy then my wife currently does. Work from home with 2 adults (with big monitors, a beefy desktop, etc) also adds energy usage.

[hedora]

Same here. We have a modern heat pump water heater. It uses 2.6 kWh per day, set to cycle down at night and during the day. Three people, short showers every other day.

(I just switched it to always on. Trying to optimize water heating timing was just preventing it from storing solar electricity as heat, and didn't change daily energy consumption much.)

Edit: I should add we almost exclusively use a dishwasher to wash dishes (< 4 gallons a day). Laundary is probably our main water consumer. Showers have High Sierra shower heads. They're inexpensive, strong stream; 1.5 gpm (5.7 LPM)

[hedora]

As a household, we're at about 30kWh per day, exclusive of commute. The 40 mile round trip commute adds about 17kWh (110mpge electric car, 2500 ft elevation change).

I recently found a 100 watt phantom load (after the 30kWh measurement), and now the house idles at 500w. That includes fridges, water treatment + water heating, internet, LAN, NAS, etc).

[joshyeager]

That is very interesting! What was causing the 100w phantom load, and how did you find it?

[hedora]

The combination of a backup synology NAS and a (basically non functional) swann security camera DVR. Mostly the DVR.

I plan to put the synology on a timer.

[saltcured]

Just piling on with more anecdata... This is for a roughly 2k sq foot house in the S.F. (East) Bay Area that was built in the 1970s with gas heat but electric clothes drier.

Early in the pandemic, we had a period where it was unoccupied but not really shutdown, i.e. refrigeration continued and lights were on timers for security. I can call this the baseline/idle load. It was about 9.2 kWh per day and 0.3 therms per day of natural gas for the pilot lights and tank-based water heater. When occupied in mild weather, our baseline moves to about 10.2 kWh per day and 0.5 therms of natural gas with cooking and water heater usage.

Our peak highest usage for electricity seems to be about 13.2 kWh per day in a summer month with terrible AQI where we had filtration fans running and even deployed a portable A/C due to not being able to do our normal natural cooling of the house. Our peak natural gas usage was around 5.2 therms per day for a cold winter month.

Edit to add clarification: these are averages over a 1 month billing period, not instantaneous peak power etc. When looking at finer grained usage, our electricity is quite flat over time with weekly spikes when we run our laundry and dry clothes with electricity.

[Valgrim]

My impression is that gas appliances are much more common in Europe. Gas stove, gas heating, gas water heater, washing machine, etc are all very common. Also insulation and windows are usually much higher quality, and the climate is a lot milder than northern America due to the Gulf Stream.

[stinos]

Even just cooking on the induction hob, or using the (electric oven) will already blow your entire day budget.

My thoughts exactly. Without any cooking at all (and exluding heating) we would do like 2.5kWh/day. But add a morning coffee (drip), noon thea (boil with induction), and a nice dinner to that (at least 2 induction plates, often oven as well) and that number simply doubles.

So OP: really curious to how you do the cooking, if any?

[cptskippy]

There are a lot of factors at play, climate is by far is the biggest. I moved from the east coast to the west coast of the United States and my home energy consumption was halved.

That being said, we still used 9600kWh last year which is more than double your consumption.

[r00fus]

The two numbers are off because you're full electric and parent comment is likely gas+electric.

And the gas part is what's likely more of a problem in Europe - since a lot of that is coming from Russia (it's also non-renewable).