Big Electricity Bill

[echnidna]

What about turning every thing off in turn while checking the meter to see if the disk is spinning.

[Howdya do that]

Its the beer fridge.
You keep opening the door too often.

Check the fridge seals, particularly at the bottom.

That's must be why mine is nearly a grand per quarter

[silentC]

There is no disk!

The meters they install now are digital. They click over every time another kwh is used. I've been monitoring it now every hour to see what happens. We went out to lunch, leaving nothing on. No water being used (hence no pumps, no septic system load), no lights no TV. We still used 2 kwh in a little over an hour. If it went at that rate all day, we would be up to 48kwh for the 24 hour period, which is more than 10kwh over our current average, so obviously 2kwh in an hour is up above the average for the day.

Someone just suggested to me there could be a 'leak' in one of the underground cables. Does this sound likely? I would have thought this would trip the earth leakage, but then if the problem is on the grid side of the meter board, would it?

[Big Shed]

Just because you went out to lunch doesn't mean the septic system stops working, those pumps get automatically switched on and off by the septic system controller. Likewise your fridge(s) and freezer(s) would still have been going. Granted it would be hard to see that lot chewing up 2Kw in an hour.

[silentC]

If it was the septic pumps etc. I would expect to see peaks (they only come on periodically). Instead, I'm seeing a fairly constant usage of 1.5kw per hour. It's almost predictable. 10:15 to 11:15 - 2 units, 11:15 to 12:15 - 1 unit, 12:15 to 1:15 - 2 units, 1:15 to 2:15 - 1 unit etc. If it proceeds at that rate, we get to 36 units in 24 hours, which is what I recorded last night. These meters only tick over every 1 kwh, so it's hard to tell if I have a 1kw peak every other hour, or a steady 1.5kw per hour.

Some things are using up power at a constant rate and others are causing little peaks that get absorbed in the 'granularity' of the meter. I think the only way I'll get to the bottom of it is to switch things off one by one, as suggested by Bob, and monitor. I've already started doing that by turning off the beer fridge and a couple of other things over night - with no noticeable affect so far.

My head hurts...

[marker]

If it is a dual occupancy there may be a cross over in the wiring and your'e suppling some of their power.

Mark

[silentC]

This is a possibility that has crossed my mind. I guess I can prove that by flicking my main switch and then checking all the points etc. in their place. However I would be very surprised if that has happened by mistake, because the guy we have used knows his stuff. He is a good mate of the old man's though, so it's possible they made a deal.

[spartan]

Silent,
this is a reasonably common complaint/concern of electricity distribution customers. So much so, that in Qld, they have setup a first point of call website for people to review - called the energy institute....

http://www.energyinstitute.com.au/en...gy-report.aspx

Follow this link and let me know how you go, I may be able to step you through working a few things out.....

[silentC]

Country Energy has something similar. I went through and did it yesterday and according to it, our bill should be about 2/3 what the last one was. I'll go through and do that one too and see what comes up.

The thing I'm trying to make clear though is that our habits haven't really changed. Our hot water is actually more efficient, so our Off Peak has nearly been cut in half. It's the standard rate that has increased. The things that I can see as being contributors to the increase are:

12v Halogen downlights - supposedly use less energy than an incandescant bulb but we have heaps more of them

Water pumps - all our water is pumped from the tank to the house at mains pressure. The pumps come on every time a tap is turned on and there is no doubt a surge of power required to start them each time

Septic system - has an air pump that is on a timer and a water pump on a float switch which comes on when the pump out drum is full - may switch on once a day in normal use or several times on washing days.

Recycled water for toilet/irrigation - has an air pump which comes on for 2 hours per day, plus an irrigation pump which is on a float switch. May switch on once a day, or several times on washing days.

A small upright freezer which is new to us. Otherwise we have always run two fridges, one in the kitchen and a beer fridge.

Otherwise, things like TV, stereo, PC, Playstation etc. are on and off at various times as always. We don't switch off at the wall.

What I'm looking for is something that has added about 15kwh per day to our electricity usage. Something that we didn't have before. I'm buggered if I can work out what it is.

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.

[DavidG]

15Kwh per day = 600 or so watts per hour.

???? Solar hot water heaters have an element about that size to prevent frost damage. Stuck on ?????????????????

[spartan]

600 watts per hour would be about 10 x12volt halogens - based on 61 watts per fitting. 50 watt globe and 11 watts for the transformer.

We have been installing lots of 240v energy efficient halogen replacements lately. You basically get a 50 watt reduction per fitting based on an 11 watt globe.

Coversion kits 240v to 12v are about 5.95. Globes are about $19.95, but they last significantly longer (50000 hours).

After that, check the side panel on your water pumps - they can draw a lot of power - up to 1400 watts.....

PC draw 175 watts when idle (turn on but not doing anything, 225 watts when operating within normal params. They draw 20 watts when in sleep mode.

[silentC]

No solar hot water David. We have a 315l electric storage job. It uses about 6 or 7kwh per day on Off Peak 1 at 5 cents per kwh.

The water pumps are next on the hit list. Although they wouldn't account for the steady rate throughout the day. I can hear the pumps running from my office and so I know that they rarely come on during the day. We jumped up to 4kwh between 6:15 and 8:30 tonight, which is to be expected.

I'll check out the 240v conversion as well. I'm not convinced the lights are the culprits because we don't leave them on and they're not on during the day, yet we're still doing 1.5kwh per hour, which is roughly the hourly average for the whole day (36kwh). Says to me that our usage doesn't fluctuate too much with the time of day. Also the other house has more halogens and they're all on all the time at night, yet their bill is about 1/4 of ours.

Before I go to bed tonight, I'm going to take a reading and then turn off everything in the house at the wall (besides the fridges). Let's see how much we burn overnight. If I still have a steady draw, I know something's fishy.

I'll get to the bottom of this if it kills me.

[RufflyRustic]

Good Luck Silent! It's a huge thing, but I'm really impressed with how you are slowly but surely eliminating the items that are not using all the power.

cheers
Wendy

[DavidG]

Pity I was not closer. I could stick an amp-meter inplace of each fuse and check the loads per cct.

[echnidna]

Check that your hot water is running on the night switch instead of the day switch.