« | Home | »

Home Energy Use Measured in Kilowatt-Hours

By Solar energy | September 9, 2008

How Many Kilowatt-Hours Does Your Home Use?

Making an informed choice about solar home energy requires knowing how many kilowatt-hours your home uses. Until the recent concern with our environment and energy prices, many have never paid much attention to how many kilowatt-hours their home uses.

What is a kilowatt-hour?

Electric utility companies measure your home energy use in kilowatt-hours. Looking at my energy bill tells me how many kilowatt-hours (symbolized kWh) my home used during the billing cycle.

A kilowatt-hour is a unit of energy equal to one kilowatt of power used for one hour. For example, my floor lamp uses .29kWh/hr. That means, if that floor lamp remains on for one hour, it will use .29 kilowatts of power. The lamp would have to be in use approximately 3448 hours to use one kilowatt of power.

Today I called my home energy provider for tips on reducing my home energy consumption. The customer service representative I talked to was very pleasant and gave me helpful information. But the most interesting tidbit of information was about average kilowatt-hour usage.

My service provider, Pedernales Electric, says the average home uses one kilowatt-hour per one-square-foot of floor space. In other words, my 1700 square foot home should average 1700 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month. That’s 54.8 kilowatt-hours per day.

Other sources inform me that efficient use is 15 kilowatt-hours per day; anything over 20 kilowatt-hours per day is wasteful. The folks here talk about using 20 kilowatt-hours and less per day!

For the first 6 months of this year, I’ve averaged 51 kWh/day. By my energy provider’s standards, I’m doing well. According to others, I’m excessively wasteful!

OK. I’m on a mission. First things first. What are the high-energy users in my home? I’ll let you know how it goes.

What’s your average energy use?

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Topics: Home Energy Use, Reducing energy use | No Comments »

Comments