In an exchange that reflects blogging the way it’s supposed to happen, Ton left a comment about energy usage data in the Netherlands on my post about my postal code. And then, when I asked him a question about this, he responded with a detailed and very helpful blog post of his own.
One of the things he revealed there is that his house in the Netherlands consumes 3700 kWh per year of electricity.
Because we’ve been doing detailed logging of our own electricity consumption, this gives me an opportunity to compare.
Our Maritime Electric electricity meter read 1702925 on April 24, 2017 and reads 2246469 as of one minute ago, a difference of 543544, or 5435.44 kWh.
This means that we consume 1735 kWh–46% more–per year for our detached single family home of three than Ton’s detached single family home of three.
Our friends Bill and Michelle, who are also participating in my electricity and water monitoring project, and also have a detached single family home of three, started out at 3125321 and are now at 3615162, a difference of 489841, or 4898.41 kWh, which is about 10% less than us, and 32% higher than Ton.
I’d be interested in drilling down into the primary reasons why our electricity consumption is so much higher.
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I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
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Comments
Not sure what the difference
Not sure what the difference might be. In our previous home we used less energy, likely due to the always-on ventilation system in our current home. All our light bulbs are <10W LEDs, which may be a large difference with North America perhaps. Like you we probably have a range of always on devices not found in many other places (file servers, NAS drives, the TTN Gateway, etc.) Do you use any electricity for heating? (Here all gas) We don't use electricity for cooking but gas. Cooking may also explain the difference with our neighbours, as induction is quite common for cooking, given that our neighbourhood average comes much closer to Bill and Michelle's usage.
We heat with oil, but the
We heat with oil, but the furnace mechanisms (water pumps, etc.) do use electricity.
We do cook with electricity, both the oven and the range, and that’s a difference from both you and from Bill & Michelle, as you both cook with gas.
Our biggest consumer of electricity is our clothes dryer.
Mailed you a daily usage
Mailed you a daily usage overview of the past year, for comparison.
If you are interested in an
If you are interested in an inter-provincial comparison point, I could provide Ontarian data as well.
Our large corporate
Our large corporate electricity company in Berlin provides a helpful graph of our annual consumption, with comparisons to our previous year's usage and average household use in Germany.
We live in 100 yr old apartment block, centrally heated with gas. But our cooking is electric. Our four person household consumed 2600 kWh in 2017, compared to 2767 kWh the previous year, which puts us between the average German 1-2 person household. Not sure how we achieve that... Maybe because we don't have a television?
The average German 3 person household apparently consumes 4050 kWh.
orsonlephat.wordpress.com/2018/04/25/electricity-consumption-2017/
The undeniable conclusion I
The undeniable conclusion I reach from this is that, purely from an environmental justice perspective, we should move to Berlin.
For reference here in Calgary
For reference here in Calgary, we use a similar amount of electricity, averaging 400kwh per month since 2014. Family of 3, small detached house in the innercity. Our utility, Enmax, is owned by the city and says it gets 10% of its electricity from windpower. The remainder is from natural gas and coal. Alberta is phasing out all coal fired electrical generation by 2030.
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