Electrical usage in the house to High ?

MisterDrak

Hi,

Looking for a steer or advice on this ?

The electrical bills in the house have been consistently to high for the last year or more. There are two components to this :-

1. The unit charge, which came down last month (now .32). In addition I have just changed providers to get a further small discount on unit charge. Basically I have visibility and can manage this part of the pricing…

2. The actual KW usage. This seems consistently way to high for our situation. I have completed the usage thingy on the Energia site and it says that I have 160% higher usage than similar type homes.

The context for above is that are only 2 of us in the house (kids gone), Heating is via gas. Short of a couple of TV's laptops (WFH) and a bit of cooking I cant account why the usage would be so high? There is one electric car, however I do very small milage < 5K per year, so cant see this making up the difference ???

I have a smart meter, however don't understand how to isolate what accounts for the large usage form normal usage ???

In addition I have downloaded the hourly daily usage in a CSV and brought into Excel, and created a heat map, there seems to be massive swings in usage. Some days 10KW, others 70KW ???

Anyway advice on how to proceed ???

niallb

An EV is a big change on your electricity bill.
Even low mileage like 5,000 miles is 1600 kWh over the year for a newish Nissan Leaf.
That's well over €500 at 0.31c before VAT etc, probably half the cost of fueling a similar sized petrol car.

Any of these questions help at all?

Can your car give you info about what days and times of days it was charged and how much energy it used?
What kind of EV is it and how big is the battery?
Any chance anyone else is using your charger!?
Does your new plan include a very cheap few hours specifically for EV charging in the dead of night?
Do you ever charge between 5PM-7PM ? - those hours can be savage on a Smart Meter plan.
Did someone leave the immersion on? 🤯

I don't currently have an EV, but there's lots of variety in plans with a smart meter, so make sure it's not working against you.
We've been doing all these sums recently as a change of job means we might be better suited by an EV than we were before.

Citizen Six

Can you get daily readings? And check your reading before, and after, charging the car.

ongarite

Go to ESB Networks site, register an account with your smart meter MPRN. Then go to Energy Usage and download HDF file. This is the usage data direct from the meter.

Go to energypal website and upload the HDF. This will break down usage over 24 hours & then use that data to see is it EV charging, etc.

I've an EV doing 4x your annual mileage but charging cost is 4x less on my night EV rate

Citizen Six

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122285313#Comment_122285313

No way, I didn’t think you could get the data like that. They told me to have access to the data from my smart meter, I’d have to sign up for a smart tariff.