[jacquesm]

Lol. Ok: first, you get 25 hamsters...

No, more seriously: we started off by pulling all the breakers and to go 'from scratch', then every time I re-connected a breaker I monitored the increase in power draw. This took a bit of time but after a while we figured out there were a number of really bad consumers: my PC (which had a very high end graphics card in it from a machine learning project a couple of years ago), the NAS (which had 12 bays), an older fridge (though I thought it was quite energy efficient, but this really wasn't the case), a water heater hidden under the kitchen cupboards (that one took forever to track down), some smaller loads but still considerable (a couple of studio monitors, game computer that was on standby when not in use, a large studio mixer, a massive pump for the infloor heat that worked just as well (or even better) with the lowest setting as the one that it was on) and then a large number of really small loads that were always on but rarely needed.

Removing all of those saved us 2/3rds of our power draw, we went from 30 to 35 KWh to around 8 to 10 KWh / day. After that it was relatively easy to get to '0' using solar panels and another batch of them and we were suddenly offsetting our gas usage with surplus electricity (which the power company buys).

No hamsters were harmed in the preparation of this message.

[wrycoder]

Thanks for this. I'm averaging a kw in a small house and don't understand where it's going. When we put in a hot tub, it only raised the monthly bill about 10% (it's worth that). Gas heat, gas water heater and stove. Most lights are LED at this point. Using laptops, no big graphics machines.

I need to do what you did, though I was thinking about hacking up a clip-on ammeter and some monitoring software to examine the various breaker branches.

[jacquesm]

Oh, as for laptop: I ended up buying a second hand W540 which is pretty beefy when you want it to be but normally it sips power (about 29 watts continuous draw, the screen is off because I have two external monitors connected). Oh, and about those monitors: I've reduced the backlight intensity from the default quite a bit and that made a real difference as well (besides the usual power saving and desktop lock settings).

[jacquesm]

> I was thinking about hacking up a clip-on ammeter

The easiest spot is right on the distribution wires, they usually are pretty beefy and that means you don't have to re-hang your meter after every breaker. They're also very well insulated so the chances of shorting something out diminish a lot (but if you do the effects will be far more spectacular ;) ).

In the end I installed a 'Shelly' three phase current meter permanently with the pickups around the mains wires. That gave me very precise logging (and given that the distribution board passes those three wires roughly balanced out across the breakers it is already quite fine grained). It also allows you to spot intermittent consumers and for the money I wished I had installed it earlier during my hunt.