Electricity Monitoring: The Importance of Knowing Your Baseload

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By Peter Troast - June 18th, 2009

I continue to be astonished at the insight and thoughtfulness of many of the commenters on Energy Circle. Unfortunately, within the post/comment convention of our articles and blogs, comments tend not to get the exposure many of them deserve. So I thought it would be a good practice, from time to time, to feature some of them more prominently.

Not long ago I wrote about Google's announcement that it might be backing away from appliance specific measuring techniques as it closes in on the launch of PowerMeter. I indicated that losing appliance based specifications wouldn't matter all that much. Specifically, I wrote: "Since projecting our electricity usage in real time on the web,... it’s become clear to us both when the peaks in our usage occur, and what is causing them, without sweating the small stuff." As we've annotated the graphs produced by the TED-to-Twitter electricity monitoring system we launched on Earth Day, it is those peaks and changes in the data that tend to draw the most focus.

Two readers took umbrage with this attention to peaks in a particularly instructive way. The first is Tom Harrison, who writes the Five Percent, Conserve a Little Energy blog (highly highly recommended), who noted that the usage we should be focusing on isn't the irregular and readily identifiable spikes, but rather base load. Tom pointed out that by removing a few "small" items that drew power continuously in his house he was able to reduce his full-time electricity consumption by around 200W. He simply used smart power strips to transform those items from "always on" into "as needed." He offers some compelling math:

That doesn't sound like much -- just a couple of light bulbs, right? Wrong. For each 100W x 24 hours x 365 days, I reduced my annual electrical bill by a little more than $100. And since our bill is now running at less than $100/month, that adds up to a rather large percentage of our bill....[I]t's important to remember that all power matters. I found the simplest fixes were the small loads that were on all the time.

Tom's comment was seconded by David Fay:

It's an odd fact about household energy displays that our eye is irresistably drawn to those huge firestorms of kilowatt spikes when what we should really be paying attention to is that constant background hum of small numbers of watts being consumed day in and day out.

David backed his point up with solid math, too:

My house's baseline usage is about 350 watts, day in and day out. That seems insignificant compared to the 6000 watts the dryer draws when we fire it up, but unlike the dryer it is always there and it adds up very quickly. 350 watts over 24 hours is 8.4 kWh a day, which is about 2/3 of our daily household usage.

Thanks Tom and David for driving home this point. Both are reminders of the power of measuring electricity usage and the accessibility of low hanging fruit to homeowners. There has never been a better time for money to find its way back to our pockets.

(And there's a complete baseload assessment about to happen here, which I'll report back on later.)

Comments

Peter I was hoping you could give me an idea of your monthly u

Peter

I was hoping you could give me an idea of your monthly use
I have noted that I am at about 80KwH per month over the past few months.
Wondering if I am reading that correctly?
I am going about this a bit differently, trying to get an idea of a few months averages.
Then I can start 'fine tuning'.
Also looking at Solar PV Panels, a 1 KW array could supply my blissfully ignorant house with all the electricity I need I think.

Bottom line is 80 Kwh about average for 4 person 2500 sq foot house in Maine?

Thanks

Posted by Thomas McInerney on Nov 14, 2009 12:47pm

Tom,If you're at 80kwh, I'm duly impressed. Our most recent CMP

Tom,If you're at 80kwh, I'm duly impressed. Our most recent CMP bill for a similarly sized house was 747 kwh (down 29% from 1059 kwh for the same time period of 08). We have fairly normal electric use with these anomalies: our dryer is electric, we have a freezer in the basement, and we supplement one cold room with a Vornado electric heater in the cold months (though we've toughed it out so far this year.) Little Papi, the turtle that required an 8 hour/day heat lamp was re-released into the wild in August. Assuming you are in CMP, any electric bill will list the last 13 months. Keep me posted. Look forward to hearing how your effort proceeds. Best, Peter

Posted by energycircle on Nov 19, 2009 5:43pm

have noted that I am at about 80KwH per month over the past few

have noted that I am at about 80KwH per month over the past few months.
Wondering if I am reading that correctly?
I am going about this a bit differently, trying to get an idea of a few months averages.
Then I can start 'fine tuning'.
Also looking at Solar PV Panels, a 1 KW array could supply my blissfully ignorant house with all the electricity I need I think.

Posted by susan on Jan 3, 2010 5:51pm

Susan: data from our TED 5000/Google PowerMeter says we used 860

Susan: data from our TED 5000/Google PowerMeter says we used 860 kwh in December, 600 kwh in November. The increase, I believe, is largely attributable to growing use of a one room electric heater as winter arrives. (Overall, our 3 BR/4 person house isn't a particularly big electricity user--we have no air conditioning, heat primarily with oil, and have swapped out most of our lighting for LED's or CFL's. Our biggest challenge continues to be laundry, and particularly the challenge of using a clothesline this time of year.)

So unless you're running on an enviously tiny amount, I suspect the data may be off. Most electric bills from your utility will list a year's worth of data.

Solar PV, depending on how well it integrates on your particular house, and what incentives exist in your state, can be a great way to go. But, more often, it makes sense to tackle the efficiency opportunities first, then size the solar based on the lower use.

Keep us posted as you proceed. Thanks.

Posted by energycircle on Jan 4, 2010 3:10am

Susan --If you're reading your bill, then you're reading correct

Susan --If you're reading your bill, then you're reading correctly -- check to make sure the number of days in the billing cycle is around 30. A really good place to start is the electricity bill, and many bills these days have historical monthly usage figures.Based on my TED 5000, for the past December, our modest, single-family house with four people used 530kWh, 240 kWh of which was baseload -- "always on". November was 410/200 respectively, and October was the first month Google PowerMeter was available, so only have partial data there. According to PowerMeter, this usage is on the low end of a 2 bedroom apartment -- at 80kWh/month your usage is downright incredible, and yes, a 1KW array could probably more than cover your usage.Now, if only around 100 million other American households could follow your lead, we would be on to something :-)Tom

Posted by Tom Harrison on Jan 4, 2010 4:34am