Only Electricity no Gas

[jon]

I can't get my usage down below 3kWh day and 3kWh night, with new rates costing £3.21 per day. This is with the help of two solar panels.

[Tim Streater]

Just wait til December, when they'll be no help at all.

[Rod Speed]

jon [e-mail] wrote

Then you need to hang yourself.

[alan_m]

How are you defining night - 6pm to 6am?

Currently in this household when everything gets switched off to go to bed and until people awake the consumption is around 0.15kW per hour.

Solar is only going to provide some of your energy between 9am and 4pm this time of year, and much less in the coming 3 months. If you are using solar to heat a tank of water possibly make sure that it is only doing so around mid-day.

[Andy Burns]

I have no solar panels, whenever I'm awake there is at least one and usually two computers on, along with all the 'background' stuff, over the course of september, my electricity usage was below 6kWh/day ... what's your heating?

[Spike]

September electricity usage here was 223 kWh; overnight (0000 to 0800) is around 1.2 kWh.

Central heating and DHW by gas.

[Andy Burns]

You mean 0.15kW ?

[Martin Brown]

It is quite unusual to have constant usage day and night like that. How are you achieving it? Continuous underfloor electric heating?

First thing is look at your base load that is present 24/7 mine is 70W minimum which over 24 hours is a daily fixed usage of 1.8kWhr.

More typically our base load is 100W once the house is being lived in and at least one of my computers is running. So 2.4kWh daily minimum.

[Martin Brown]

Two solar panels gets you about 800W tops in bright sunshine so it isn't going to make much of a dent in your usage figures.

That is a bit on the high side. I aim for <100W base load and I have a lot of high tech gadgets and emergency lights that are hot 24/7.

You should look for appliances that have unusually high standby currents. Older TVs and VCRs are obvious suspects as are PC sound systems (mine draws the same current on or off!). The on/off switch alters the state on the on/off LED and disconnects the audio input.

The easiest DIY short term saving is to super insulate your hot water tank (or more drastic give up on piped hot water entirely and boil a kettle instead). Make sure the immersion heater head end isn't covered though. Likewise only fill the kettle with the volume of water you need.

I am about to super insulate my hot water tank since that represents the largest single cost of running my house right now (about 3kWh daily).

[Brian Gaff]

I'm on a fixed rate till June 2024, but after that who knows. Brian

[Smolley]

I have two radiators on (bathroom and living room) with domestic hot water @ 42C....I run the heating system (Heatpump)for 5 hours (3:30to8:30)during the second cheap rate cycle. I am going to run my computers off the 12v system from the solar panels (have two 12v to 19v @8A up scalers) , alas the 27" monitors are 50W each and require mains.

[Mark Carver]

Presumably you have a fridge, so consider that in your 'background ' consumption ?

[Jeff Layman]

Isn't that a bit optimistic? Two solar panels cover about 3m^2. On the equator at midday the sun supplies 1kW/m^2, so 3kW over the 3m^2. Most panels are around 20% efficient, so you'd get around 600W around midday from them. At any other time you'll get progressively less, and once you move away from the equator - most certainly to latitudes outside the Tropics - it will be much less.

According to the wiki, insolation in July in London is 4.74kWh/m^2 per day. In December it's 520Wh/m^2

[The Legal Occupier]

How do I report this for abuse:

Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!weretis.net!feeder8.news.weretis.net!lilly.ping.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: "Rod Speed" [e-mail] Newsgroups: uk.d-i-y Subject: Re: Only Electricity no Gas Date: Sun, 02 Oct 2022 19:25:34 +1100 Lines: 7 Message-ID: [e-mail] References: <thbgt2$1lceg$ [e-mail] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-15; format=flowed; delsp=yes Content-Transfer-Encoding: Quoted-Printable X-Trace: individual.net YtXEFmKwAuFLe0wXyJPUjgJoAbjjJoQEMm05JUevS8wXf1A6o= Cancel-Lock: sha1:yPQzNRbwdTbL0dS1Q+H+AnP6Blg= User-Agent: Opera Mail/1.0 (Win32) Xref: reader01.eternal-september.org uk.d-i-y:1207405

jon [e-mail] wrote

Then you need to hang yourself.

[Martin Brown]

It depends on the angle between the sun and the collector so yes it is an upper bound. It power collected scales as cos(x) so for modest misalignments you don't lose too much output.

The ones I am looking at right now are about 370W at normal incidence. Most of them are 20% efficient these days apart from the cheapest and nastiest ones but they are also 1.8m^2 in physical area.

[Martin Brown]

You really need to figure out exactly where the power is going. IME Heat pumps are a waste of time unless your home is incredibly well insulated. Investing in additional loft insulation or warmer clothes is your best bet.

Right now a house hardly needs any heat input - your heating bills are going to be truly enormous when winter comes.

You absolutely must put an automotive type 12v fuse in series with the supply lead from the battery and close to it. SLA's can source very large currents and can be a fire hazard without fuse protection. Wires can get red hot in just a few seconds if there is a short.

Inverters to generate mains from 12v or 24v DC are not that hard to obtain. However, your main problem here is the space heating.

[Theo]

Forward with headers to [e-mail], see:

[JNugent]

£1,171 a year?

I wish our bills were as low as that.

But I take it that your figures are for the tariff before 1st October and so will rise?

[alan_m]

He doesn't say what energy supply for heating.

[Martin Brown]

Assuming the OP and "Smolley" are the same then it is all electric with some sort of heat pump but not stated air source or ground source.

He'd be even worse off with bottle gas or oil since there is no price cap at all on them - you pay top dollar for either of them. Even classic solid fuels have gone up in price due to petrol price increases.