Elecitrical Bill: Always On & Other Issues

Skyte

My parents bill has the Always On and Other bills as extremely high, well above average home comparisions, its half the cost of the bill. The house is heated by oil so no weird immersion issues. I cant think of what is drawing so much power, I have smart plugs in all the major applicances (bar kitchen stuff) that turns off the TV's/ Consoles at certain times, the laptops/PC have schedules to switch off at night.

Im looking for some help in investigating what is happening in these categories.

RetroEncabulator

It's possible that bill is just using national averages, guessing with AI and apportioning demand to different categories?

There is no way for the smart meter to know what appliance is using what energy. It just measures the kWh being used per whatever segment of an hour it records.

antoinolachtnai

Old appliances, particularly the fridge freezer?

The draw at 12 and 5pm, is that cooking?

RetroEncabulator

I would suspect it's just apportioning more of the load to things your parents don't actually use. E.g. you might be using more energy for let's say laundry and that's being instead categorised as cooking.

Something like an old non-heat pump tumble dryer can put the price up.

A lot of oven cooking in older poorly insulated ovens, certain types of cookers, usually older models, etc etc an all be big hogs of energy.

If you haven't swapped out your lighting for LEDs that's also a huge load when you add up all those individual 100W and 60W bulbs.

In some houses, well water pumps or pressure booster pumps that are misconfigured and run a lot or continuously can be an issue.

For example, if the pump trips into action continuously and isn't being heard

I'd read that itemisation with an ENORMOUS pinch of salt though. It simply cannot possibly know that much about your usage and is guesstimating everything.

the_amazing_raisin

The only way to figure this out is with energy monitoring

I'd suggest getting a plug in energy meter to start with

Plug in each of your appliances for a few hours or up to a day and check the kWh consumed

Compare this to the data from the smart meter to see if it's classifying things correctly

You can also get a whole house energy monitor which will help you figure out the energy needs of the built in appliances like the oven or cooker

Once you have a clear understanding of the consumers in the house you can see if there's any anomalies like an appliance using a lot more than it should

I'd also ensure when you measure the power of something you include the smart plug, just in case the plugs themselves are drawing some power

10-10-20

These usage calculators work off predicted human behaviour and apply a function to represent each of the categories listed, such as cooking, entertainment etc.

In the case of "always on" it appears to use the lowest hourly consumption between 2am and 5am as the indication of the base-load power consumption within the house. In your case you appear to be drawing around 190w continuously, and this is then being used to calculate the always-on power consumption over either 24hrs or over the billing period.

190w *24hrs = 4.56kWh, which equals 273kWh in 60 days, which is around 109 EUR (at 40c per unit) for the billing period.

So yeah, as the rest have said, you've got to look at the overall consumption of these devices which are left on and that should bring some good savings over time.

An Owl energy meter is what I would use, and then unplug devices as a test, etc.

https://www.theowl.com/index.php/products/energy-monitors/

Skyte

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121020037#Comment_121020037

Thanks for the suggestions, I was thinking of picking up an energy monitor.