I don't heat my home with electricity, and I am not home at the moment. Without lighting and cooking it does 4kwh/d.
When I am home and cook, wash and have the lights on I do about 7.
Factoring in the heating (Swedish "fjärrvärme", remote heating. Hot water from a central plant) I do A LOT more. Something like an extra 30kwh/d in the winter months for a 120 m2 home with half-decent insulation by Swedish standards.
I measured a groundsource heatpump to consume about 30-50 kWh per day in -20c for hot water and heating a 100m2 house. About 22c indoors in a 70s somewhat poorly insulated 1-story brick/stone house. A good 1/3 of that energy goes to hot water.
In houses where hot water is heated with electricity the ratio might be even worse.
Another data point: 180m2 house renovated in 2009, very well insulated, brand new 5.1 COP GSHP equipment we averaged 36 kWh per day for heat in January. We generate some hot water from that but our primary hot water is resistive electric.
Another data point: Our fairly old house, heated with an air heat exchanger, use about 60 kWh per day during the winter months. The power draw for heating is reduced to almost nothing during the coldest period when the outside air is too cold and we use firewood.
Apart from heating the house, we also use some power for hot water and pumping water from the well into the house.
When my apartment was empty for a few days last month, it used 2.2kWh/day.
I used 1700kWh of electricity last year, presumably mostly on cooking and the fridge-freezer. I don't have the district heating (fjernvarme) bill to hand, but that wouldn't be comparable to a house anyway.
Full size fridge and freezer from 2015, forced ventilation fan (which is probably around 35-60w), one server (a repurposed office computer) and 2 WiFI hotspots, one of those Google speakers, a router (USG) and a PoE switch. Those are the big ones.
We didn't build the house, so there are all kinds of standby stuff (including needing smart lights for most lights, stove, towel heaters).
I didn't turn these things off because my mother in law is using the apartment a little while we are gone.
4kWh is 166W average, which is a refrigerator and a couple WiFi access points, a camera, a home assistant device, and some other random plugged in devices (i.e. cordless phone).
Indeed. I just looked up the heat loss for my house: 213W/ deg K. So, to maintain 20 deg C inside with -20 deg C outside requires about 8.5kW of heat energy (200m2 single-family house built around 2008), or approx 200kWh/day.
Generally by using the dimensions and heat conduction properties of the exterior surfaces of the house (area of foundations, walls, windows, roof), taking into account the heat gain due to sun, with some local fudge factors applied (loss due to wind, natural ventilation, outside temperature).
Then, after the building is actually built and inhabitated, the calculations are adjusted by the actual energy consumption over year).
As pointed out, competent HVAC companies should have people on staff comfortable with such calculations. However, my experience shows that it is not universally true, and many are just guided by intuition/experience with other projects (i.e. the roof insulation thickness on the previous project was X, so that's good enough for you, or "well, on average we recommend 50W/m2 of heating power when selecting a heat source"). Which probably works fine for many cases (e.g. renovating an older building, where even if the material properties when they were new are known, you can only guess the values after 20 years of service).
Even a very well insulated home can use quite a bit of electricity.
The most rigorous standard for home efficiency, the Passive House standard, stipulates that no more that 15kWh/m^2/yr is used for space heating. For a 200m^2 house, that's 3000kWh/yr.
Given a 120 day (4 month) heating season, that's 25kWh/day average just for space heating. Obviously it varies quite a bit, with some days much higher and others much lower. Add in other electricity uses, like refrigeration, laundry, and you're easily at 40+ kWh/day even in an efficient Passive House.
That is obscenely high. Where I live, it would cost over ~~150k~~ 7k USD to use that much power every day for a whole year. How is it even possible to use this much energy??
This means that you pay ~4 USD per kWH. That's almost 12 times more expensive than in Germany where electricity is supposedly expensive. Where do you live?
Wow, how is 100 kWh/day even possible? We consume about 3 kWh/day (excl. heating) in our standard-sized 2-person Dutch household, living pretty normal life.
Its going to be 39C at about 60% humidity today here with a bright sun beating down. My home has some decent insulation, double paned low-E windows without metal framing, thick attic blown insulation, etc. AC is set for about 26C. I'll probably still use about 70kWh of power today with the majority of that being the AC. A pool pump uses a good bit of power too though, pumping about 60,000 gallons of water through the filters uses a good bit of power.
You can do 3kWh maybe if you are not cooking using electricity or running a cleaning machine for dishes or clothes.
I've installed an electricity meter 2 weeks ago, and the lowest it got was 4,8 kWh/day in a 2-person Croatian household, although I do have a small Synology NAS running 24/7 and we have a TV on for a couple of hours.
2 Adults, 2 kids, also close to 10 kWh per day (cooking on electricity (induction) but showering on natural gas, 0.6-0.8 m3/day). When we are not home, it's about 4 kWh per day (2 freezers, 1 fridge, home server, router etc). Big sources are Laundry, dishwasher, hot water in the kitchen (5L boiler).
But we heat the house on gas, and last december we burned about 180 m3 of it. Now, during summer, (in the Netherlands) we don't need heating or air-conditioning.
2 adults, 1 kid, belgium. One adult is always WFH (we alternate). Average of 13KWh per day. There is a server rack running in the basement though 24/7 but its optimized (nucs and rpis and no costly energy burning servers) and this rack alone accounts for 3-4 KWh per day (out of the 13)
We heat and cook using natural gas.
The biggest consumer are the same here. Dishwasher and laundry.
Not sure how you are managing this, are you sure your numbers are correct? When I turn my kettle on it consumes more then 2kW, yes it is running for a few minutes at a time but it all adds up, not to mention the electric oven.
With all major appliances off (except the fridge/freezer) I consume ~0,13 kW/h, that adds up to 3,36 kWh in 24 hours.
24kWh a day here. Fairly large house near Cape Town, South Africa. This is excluding heating in winter, for which we mainly use a slow combustion fireplace and also natural gas. Stove is also natural gas. Rarely use AC for cooling.
Easy, live in a house 4x the size of a 2-person Dutch household and in a climate that averages 10 degrees C warmer, like would be common in the southeast US.
I ran your figures through a local price comparison engine. [0] Cheapest rate for you here would be ~12800€, or ~$13400/year. For reference, that's slightly less than half the median net income here. [1]
I also made a quick price comparison between the US and here:
My conclusion is the US provide a reference framework of cheap abundant energy. The environmentally conscious have to deal with a framework that stimulates unbridled energy consumption, with hardly any real incentives for conserving energy.
Update. Local price comparison site was just updated this morning. Price here would be between 14569€ (.40€/kWh) and 17308€ (.47€/kWh) depending on the supplier chose. This includes all taxes and surcharges.
Something is off here, even if both your cars use about 40kWh per day, every day (which is humongous) that would still leave an absolutely staggering 60kWh/day. That would be the same as heating with electric alone a house in the Nordic Lapland during winter.
Given a COP of 5 for a ground source heat pump you can calculate 60/24 is 2,5kW power draw around the clock. Multiply by 5 give 12,5kW heat non stop. That is a lot of heat.
2000 sqft is 185m2 which is a mansion by my standards though :)
Average sq ft for house in US is around 2500sq ft so 2000 sq ft is below median. Ok starter house but not more than that. I understand that houses in Europe are much smaller though due to low incomes and higher utility costs.
I have 2800 sq ft house and use around 30-35 kWh/day in summer. 60kWh/day is high but not outrageously high.
I just ran my last year's electricity. I'm around 26 kWh/d in the DC area in an old inefficient house around 1500 ft^2. While it had a gas stove, gas water heating, and gas house heating, it did have electric window AC units. I'd be really interested in how the previous author had 6-8 kWh/d.
I used about 8 KWh/day when I lived alone in a 1550 sqft townhouse with gas heat and cooking. That ran my IT equipment, refrigerator, and blower fans for heating and exhaust. No AC usage.
Now I'm in single family home and my energy use is bonkers, but most of that is heating while I'm missing part of my roof and an entire exterior wall. It should be criminal for a town to take two years to approve permits.
My last bill I ran 95kWh/day. Smaller house but have several adults and even more kids who all shower and do laundry as well as other things. I wish I could get it down half as much I don't see how I could at this point.
A air-water heatpump for heating that shower water would pay itself back in a few months. Solar panels would get the rest. Water is probably your biggest energy sink.
I use around 70kWh/day (but nearly zero in summer and probably 4x that on colder days).
Heating is a heat pump with probably 300% efficiency (i.e. 3kW heat for 1kW electricity). Walls are 300mm insulated wood frame. Triple glass windows. -20C for at least one week every winter. Could probably lower the consumption by recycling more heat (none of the wastewater heat from hot water running down sinks is recycled for example).
Thats incredible. We use up to 30kWh/day (heating a poorly insulated house), which is almost double the national average household daily usage here in Australia. I guess you really do use alot more power living in a freezing climate.
In a climate I live in (Latvia , -20 degC for a few weeks in winter), reasonable energy consumption for heating of single-family house is around 100kWh/m2/year.
My 200m2 house is slightly worse at ~120kWh/m2/year, or around 24MWh of energy per year (that also includes domestic hot water though).
With a ground/water heat pump it should translate to ~5MWh of electricity per year, or about the same as my current yearly electricity consumption.
I was fairly resistant to Ugg boots and the like, but I realised why they are so popular this year. You really can get by quite comfortably in a Sydney winter without heating. And my home gets cold.
When I am home and cook, wash and have the lights on I do about 7.
Factoring in the heating (Swedish "fjärrvärme", remote heating. Hot water from a central plant) I do A LOT more. Something like an extra 30kwh/d in the winter months for a 120 m2 home with half-decent insulation by Swedish standards.