Not when you're on solar. Its more akin to being poor and shopping at dollar tree - cash/solar flow is more important than total cost.

Yeah we were away from home recently and it was interesting to see that with everything "off" we were still using a constant 200W or so, so even with no one home we used just over 4kWh each day. 120kWh each month just for "idle" usage definitely is not trivial amount of money, at current prices that's £20!

Half of that is fridge which at 10 quid a month is cheap. Then another 20w for wifi router which again, looking at what you pay to your ISP is nothing.

So you got 8 pounds to account for which at UKs minimum wage is about 1 hours worth of work?

That's a weird point to make - I'm just saying 120kWh a month for a house with no one in it and just some basic appliances and network equipment is a LOT - in developing countries 120kWh would be the average energy consumption of the entire house with people living in it, and we just "waste" that because I couldn't be bothered to switch off some devices in my house. It's not about whether I can afford it or not.

For comparison, I live alone in a mid-terraced 2-bedroom house in the UK, heated with gas - and I'm currently there most of the time. My monthly electricity usage is about 180kWh a month.

I'm guessing a big chunk of the 60kWh I'm using over your baseline is the kettle! :D

Uhm. We have a 3 bed semi detached house, my consumption for November was 1267kWh of electricity. In October it was 1148kWh. And I also heat with gas(well we have a minisplit upstairs that we sometimes use for heat, but it uses like 5kWh/day max)

No idea how you use so little lol.

We vs I makes all the difference.

We (2 adults, 2 seniors, 2 small kids) blow thru 350-400 kWh on hot water alone. Another 500-600 kwh on car. Remaining 300-400kwh is cooking, lighting, tech, etc. Same average 1200kwh per month.

Take the car away and it's same 175kwh per month per person (summer here so no heating needed).

It does indeed. Also I use gas for both hot water and cooking - and keep the ambient temperature relatively low, so the fridge and freezer aren't fighting the heating.

That's very high. Has a neighbour plugged their car into your outside socket? Underfloor electric heating in the bathroom? Someone using that minisplit more than you think?

Average monthly use a house like that in Britain is 225kWh.

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/information-consumers/energy-advice...

Interesting numbers. My first instinct was that you might be reading it wrong, but you seem to be completely correct. The average use for the US is usually claimed to be about 4x that at 880kWh/month: https://www.energybot.com/blog/average-energy-consumption.ht...

I think the main difference is the prevalence of electric heating and cooling in different countries. We have a ~1400 sq ft old house in Vermont with wood heat and no air conditioning, and use about 250 kWh many months, although this jumps about 50% if we plug in an outdoor hot tub in the winter.

Our personal usage is probably dominated by an electric heat pump water heater. Do the British numbers typically include hot water, or is this usually gas? Also, what is the "multi-rate" line in the page you link, and why is this average higher? And how many people choose that?

Multi-rate is when energy's cheaper during off-peak hours - traditionally used with night storage heaters, which is why the average usage would be higher; it's more likely to be used where gas isn't available.

"Economy 7" has existed for decades, and allows a sub-circuit of the house to be energised only between roughly midnight and 7am (with an offset for each house to avoid the grid collapsing when 10 million storage heaters turn on simultaneously!)

Typically the cheap rate energy would be between a half and a third of the day-rate energy.

"Economy 7" doesn't have to be on a separate circuit; I think that's mostly seen in Scotland and North England where electric storage heaters are more common.

Where I've lived (Midlands, South East) it's just been a cheaper rate at night, so you set the dishwasher, washing machine etc to run at 4am or whatever. It's not a cost saving unless you can do this.

That's right - all energy used during the off-peak hours is at the cheaper rate - the Economy 7 "white meter" timeswitch was just a convenience for storage heater circuits.

Thanks! I'm familiar with time-of-use pricing. Growing up, we did get a better electric rate by having an electric water heater that was somehow radio controlled to only operate at certain hours.

I'm not familiar with storage heaters, though. I don't think I've ever heard of one being used in the US. For others like me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater.

Most people in Britain have gas heating and water — it's been cheap since the 1970s (I think?) when it was discovered in the North Sea. Cooking is probably evenly split between gas and some sort of electric, although electric ovens are preferred even if the hob uses gas.

The remaining difference will be the result of the big European push for energy-efficient appliances, the American preference for larger appliances, that houses are smaller in Britain, and British people have less money. (All these are related.)

But in developing countries thats exactly what you would use power for - internet, minimal LED lighting and refrigeration. If you are lucky you got AC on, but that will blow thru 120kwh in a day.

in developing countries you'd probably have AC in a single room of the house, usually the bedroom. Having AC in the whole house is very much a luxury.

source: I live in Brazil

> It motivated me to put everything on a timer that only turns power own in the evenings, since that's the only time they get used.

I was surprised to learn that a timer itself also uses power. I borrowed a Kill-a-watt from the library and found that an 2 decades old timer uses 2.3W while a newer one uses 0.6W. That tells me that I should just keep the old timer for the rare occasions.

I suppose you should consider the cost of the new timer vs the cost of the electricity at that point.

If a new timer is $20, and you're paying the US National Average for electricity of $0.165 / kwh. The new one is 0.6 and the old one is 2.3, for a 1.7 watt difference.

Doing the math, $20/$0.165=121.212kwh, or 121212 watt hours / 1.7 watts per hour = 71301.2 hours / 8760 hours in a year (not counting leap hours) = ~8.1 years for the device to pay for itself in savings.

If you're worried about the environment, then it's wasteful to take a moderately efficient system and upgrade it. If you're worried about cost, then you're not saving that much money. If you're worried about overall value for your effort, there are better things to focus on.

Even if it were perfectly efficient (0 watt standby) then it would still take 6 years to pay for itself if it were $20.