Now we’ve lived here for a full year, I was keen to see how much energy we’d actually consumed in the house (OK, I’m a geek!)
So the headline facts are as follows:
- 1 year’s energy consumption in the house – 3,395kWh. For those of you with a life, you may wonder if that is good or bad; well, the EST published figure for annual energy consumption for the average UK house (a 3-bed semi with gas central heating) is 25,500kWh, so I’d say it is good, especially when you consider that …
- in the same period, our community solar PV panels and wind turbines generated 14,035kWh, so our share of that is 2,807kWh, meaning that our net annual household consumption was 588kWh
- however, that’s not the full story, because we also have a separate home office, which Liz uses for her work, as did I when in full-time employment; the total consumption of the home office for the year was a further 337 kWh, so that puts us up to 925kWh
- mind you, that home office consumption really “belongs” to our respective employers, so I think it’s fair to ignore that
- and since Liz has “migrated” back to an office in the house since mid-Nov (the home office isn’t as well insulated) then a significant (?) proportion of our energy use in the last quarter (Nov-Jan) really “belongs” to Consumer Focus; it’s not possible to determine the exact amount though I’m afraid – Liz wouldn’t let me put energy monitors on every electrical device in the office (I don’t know, some people …) It is worth noting however that until the last quarter (as at 13th Nov 2009), our net energy consumption was -148kWh (do they call that carbon positive or negative; I’m never sure)
Anyway, time to turn this computer off, I’ve an energy debt to pay off … I’ll bore you with water consumption data in a day or two, next time the sun shines or the wind blows …
Oh, and our £3k share in the village community wind turbine is estimated to be worth 5,000kWh/yr, so what am I worrying about?
Advertisement
