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Comment by brtkdotse | Hacker News Reader

10k kWh per year seems really low. Does that include heating?

It's about 27kWh/day, and according to the stats in the link fv6 provided elsewhere in this threadset, that's average for a northeast US house. Houses in the south tend to use more like 15-16k kWh/year, due to air conditioning mostly, leaving the 2015ish national average for single detached homes closer to 13k kWh.

This post has been an interesting eye-opener for me. Somehow I've never really thought about the numbers deeply, but, having a 100-watt lightbulb on for 8 hours is almost 1kWh. My and my partners' computers + home server, at a mix of wattages and uses but mostly left on a lot, are probably using 15-20kWh daily. That's... a lot of power.

Most computing devices are more efficient that they used to be, although there are more of them. I'm reminded of this because I keep my house pretty cool in the winter and used to be my office was relatively cozy even so because of all the heat being thrown off by big CRTs and tower systems under the desk. It's much less so today.

The US 10k kWh average is extremely high.

The EU average is 3.7k kWh.

Here in Norway the average is 16k kWh a year[1], or about 44kWh a day, but then most uses electricity for heating, hot water etc and it gets fairly cold during winter.

[1]: https://forbrukerguiden.no/normalt-stromforbruk/

Similar numbers for Sweden. Americans (actually most of the English speaking world) seems to be terrified of insulation.

Is that really the accepted unit for measuring the power-consumption of a home? Can't we just use kilowatts?

10k kWh per year roughly corresponds to consuming a constant 1kW/h which sounds about right, if not a bit high, if you exclude heating. But I don't think electric heating is common in most places.

Our family uses about 5k kWh per year. That includes a lot of household appliances that run on electricity but heating is not electric.

We use about 8500kWh per year in the northeast US. This does not include space heating yet, but does include our Chevy Volt charging.

It does not, and the vast majority of people in the US have natural gas heating.

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