Electricity Bill question

Regarding the last line of Scrooge's post above ours is a 4 bed 4 person household.

Our usage for each of the last 2 years has been circa 4000 KW/H and 4100 KW/H so we come in at slightly under the average.

I last switched supplier in early October '23 and since then our average weekly usage is 78 KW/h, so still within our norm for this year to date.
 
How many fridges and freezers do you have ? Are they old ? Are they correctly calibrated ? Are the showers electric heated ? Is there plugin heaters in any room ?
 
We’re a two-adult, three-child household and we use about 5,000 KWh per year even with a gas hob and gas central heating.

In terms of reducing usage most of your consumption comes from heating water or space, so think immersion, electric shower, oven, air fryer, kettle, tumbledryer, dishwasher, washing machine.

Other things like fridge or freezer you can’t really vary. Everything else (switching off lights, TV, etc) is barely going to make a difference.

In my view the one variable you can control the easiest with least impact on lifestyle is duration and frequency of electric showers.
 
Old freezers especially can be hard enough on electricity too, after checking the usage of everything in my house I got rid of an old chest freezer which was using quite a lot compared to a newer upright. They are on 24/7 so can rack up if uneconomical.
 
skrooge said:
While I wouldn't expect a dramatic swing in the national average there might be reason to think it would tick up. For example, we're slowly moving towards a world where homes run solely on electricity (and not directly at least fossil fuels). While overall these houses are more energy efficient that doesn't mean electricity usage isn't higher.
Click to expand...
We're also moving towards a world where appliance efficiency is significantly increasing so much so that the energy rating labelling system had to be reset. No one's buying incandescent bulbs any more, air-fryers use a fraction of the energy conventional ovens did, induction hobs use a fraction of the energy, TVs are many times the size but use a fraction of the energy old ones did. More and more people are installing solar and significantly reducing their consumption. New homes are far better insulated and sizes are smaller than they were a number of years ago. Etc., etc..
 
Leo said:
We're also moving towards a world where appliance efficiency is significantly increasing so much so that the energy rating labelling system had to be reset. No one's buying incandescent bulbs any more, air-fryers use a fraction of the energy conventional ovens did, induction hobs use a fraction of the energy, TVs are many times the size but use a fraction of the energy old ones did. More and more people are installing solar and significantly reducing their consumption. New homes are far better insulated and sizes are smaller than they were a number of years ago. Etc., etc..
Click to expand...

Yes average consumption could have gone down. The point is it would be good to know.

It looks like the 4,200 figure is over 7 years old itself was a significant reduction from the previously used figure.
https://www.cru.ie/publications/25647/
Seems the was a discussion on the benefits of median vs mean.

All we can infer with that number is how we compared to those Neanderthals of the past... With their massive ovens in their dimly lit mud huts (that may or may not be bigger)

Key Findings - CSO - Central Statistics Office

www.cso.ie www.cso.ie


Plenty of reasons for an update I would think.
 
It would be nice if they were able to update with approximation of property size/type. The UKs figures are lower than ours, I assume driven by population density hence smaller homes requiring less energy on average - 2,700KwH per annum. But it could be as suggested that its an older figure.

Average gas and electricity usage

Information on average gas and electricity usage and how it is calculated.
www.ofgem.gov.uk www.ofgem.gov.uk

Ofgem is their energy regulator. It has a breakdown by low / medium high, where low is 1 bed flat/house with 1-2 people, medium is a 2-3 bedroom house with 2-3 people and high is a 4+ bedroom home with 4-5 people. They clearly can't account for every configuration. I'm in the medium, two people, working from home. We're about 20-25% under their model when I try and match, but we've 2 versus 3 people, so not way off. And I generally consider using lower users by default.

I don't believe that energy suppliers / ESB know the size/type of our properties. Census data would have this, and have a breakdown of which homes and their primary source of home heating - but clearly can't match to the energy use, but they could do some modelling.

OP, @Banjaxed is in a 4 bed, which is high, according to the UK model, 4100KwH, very close to the Irish average given as 4200. But again, its all down to what they actually use.
 
skrooge said:
Plenty of reasons for an update I would think.
Click to expand...
It serves it's purpose as an extremely crude measure for comparison. Anyone who has been paying for electricity in their current home should have no need to use national averages when comparing the relative costs of energy suppliers.

dem_syhp said:
It would be nice if they were able to update with approximation of property size/type. The UKs figures are lower than ours, I assume driven by population density hence smaller homes requiring less energy on average - 2,700KwH per annum. But it could be as suggested that its an older figure.
Click to expand...
The CSO produce similar data.
 
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