Afternoon chaps,
While having a moan in the solar panel thread about my electricity usage at home, it turns out something might be wrong somewhere. Apparently a baseline usage of ~1.5kW on the Octopus Home Display is unusually high. Encouraged by @b0rn2sk8, @200sols, @alphaomega16, and @Ron-ski, I'm posting this thread to try and figure out if my neighbour is siphoning my power or something.
I'm on the Octopus Tracker tarriff, and have been with them since April 2024. I live in a fairly large detached house, but with I think normal appliances. A couple of fridge/freezers, washer, dryer, dishwasher etc. I have an air source heat pump for the pool, but it's been turned off for >1 year as it's not being used. Central heating is gas. No electric radiators or anything like that. Backup immersion heaters that are in the water tanks (close to brand new, had a new boiler room fitted <12 months ago so no issue with old equipment) are turned OFF. I have a couple of electric cars that get charged ~twice a month each. Each charge costs around £12-13 at current prices.
I've exported my data yesterday and done some analysis to try and figure out what's going on.
For 1st April 2024 to Present:
- Average Daily Usage (kWh): 65.95 kWh
- Average Daily Cost (£): £12.69
- Peak Usage Day: June 14, 2024, with 145.19 kWh
- Average Daily Usage (Excluding Car Charging Days, kWh): 55.27 kWh
This shows my daily usage from April to Present, with the car charging days (evenings/nights with consistent blocks of >4kW usage for several hours) highlight. To make things clearer, here's the car charging days excluded.
And finally, here's our average usage per hour over the entire time period
You'll note that in first two charts, our average usage seems to have increased since October. No idea why. But the data supports this:
For 1st October 2024 to Present:
- Average Daily Usage (kWh): 74.68 kWh
- Average Daily Cost (£): £14.92
- Peak Usage Day: November 9, 2024, with 144.68 kWh
- Lowest Usage Day: November 22, 2024, with 44.11 kWh
Since this was flagged up to me as abnormal, I've been paying close attention to the data. According to the Octopus Home Display thing, in the last few weeks I've had several >£20 days, with a couple of >£30 days. This is getting really pricey and I want to figure out if there's anything I can do to fix this, since even solar panels wont help me generate 100kW a day unless I install a solar farm in the garden I think.
My display shows a consistent baseline of around 1.2kW usage at all times. That's currently costing around 30p/hr. Last night I did some investigation, here's the baseline usage:
This is with most of the family asleep, a couple of devices like a laptop on charge, and a few lights on in the house (all LEDs). All other devices like desktop PCs, TVs etc were on standby. No dishwasher/washing machine/tumble dryer (condenser type) in use.
So I went to my circuit board things, and flipped every single switch down one at a time looking for culprits:
- I went to the basement first, turned off all the circuit breakers for the water circulation pumps, boiler, pressure pumps etc. Hardly any difference.
- Turned off the power to the car charger (not in use), no difference.
- Turned off power to outside lights and floodlights, no difference.
- Turned off rooms and parts of the house via the circuit board one at a time. Not many rooms made much difference, turning off the kitchen with the fridges and freezers etc dropped things by a bit.
So that's left me scratching my head. Why am I still using 0.66kW of power at that time? £0.16/hr doesn't seem like that big of a deal since it's just under £4/day, but when a 'good' day is a £12 spend and a bad day is £20+, I'd quite like to get that £4 down. Secondly, the general baseline usage of the house as above with things on standby and no big appliances in use is around 0.5kW (~£0.09/hr) which seems ok to me?
Advice, suggestions, thoughts (and prayers) would be appreciated.
Cheers
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