Kilowatt per Hour Formula

BINGO! We have a winner folks. Well maybe---is a clothes dryer being used of do the loads of laundry get hung out on the line?

This site lists the wattage of clothes dryers at 1800 to 5000 watts. That would be a lot of electrical KWH per month. http://www.energysavers.gov/your_hom.../mytopic=10040

Three refrigerators is a lot. Add in a couple of freezers, and you have some substantial power use right there. If you can get down to two refrigerators and one freezer, that will help.

The other issue is that dish washing and clothes washing. You are spending a lot of energy heating water. For the summertime, you might try to find an old hot water tank, strip off the outer insulation, paint it black, and sit it on the south side of the house, with it plumbed in between the cold and the regular water heater. The sun can pre-heat the water for free and cut the amount of work the water heater has to do. It'll work even better if you can stick the tank in a box or crate with an old patio door as the south wall of it.

Like I said, though, we used the same dryer and all the refrigerator/freezers at the old house.

The only difference I can see is maybe another load of dishes per day, more cooking on the stove, and having to pump water.

If I use one of those wattage meters, how do I know what something SHOULD be using?

You haven't given an indication of just how much more cooking, so that is still an unknown to us.

If the refrigerators and freezers are in a warmer spot, they have to work harder. I've seen people put beer refrigerators in garages that are toaster ovens in the summer, and then wonder why their power bill is high.

On the dryer - a clog in the dryer pipe or a filter that isn't cleaned, or a mouse nest could be making it run longer.

You ask a good question on the wattage meters. First, I'm not sure a kill-o-watt meter is going to be all that much help to you. It won't measure the stove or dryer power usage. A clamp on ammeter would, but that gets a little more complex. We generally just take the readings and try to see how they fit into the overall power bill, and then adjust accordingly.

Is there another convenient way to heat the milk for cheese? Perhaps an outdoor stove that burns brush scraps, like a rocket stove? A small propane burner? Idaho gets some good sun, maybe a solar oven?

Ok, learn to read the little tags on the appliances, they will all give you the basic data usually in watts amps and voltage. but if they give you any two, then you can figure from there using the basic formula of amps times voltage = watts. A hundred watt light bulb, runs on 120 volts, simply divide the watts by the voltage and you get the amps, a bit less than one amp. if your dryer pulls 20 amps, mulitpy that by 220 volts and you get 4400 watts. How many hours does it run? With your electric well pump, it should be pulling about 375 watts when its running. how long does it run in a given day? It really should not be the cuprit. as I pointed out above it wouldnt add much more than a couple hundred Kwhs a month running continuously 24/7

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"Nothing so needs reforming as other peoples habits." Mark Twain

I will agree that the well pump is probably not the culprit, with one exception. I had a well that had a high mineral content and due to a wire rubbing on the casing of the well it rubbed through the insulation and was conducting electricty to ground all the time...when checked with a clamp on amp meter it was drawing a bit over one amp 24 hours per day.

sounds like a fault somewhere drawing lots of extra current. either the well pump, or the water heater, as others noted.

assuming 700 kWH per month extra / 30 days = 23 kWH/day,
or about 1 kWH per hour, which is 1000 watts running continuously. (ie, like a hairdryer in energy consumption, running continuously.)

if you have the electric meters that you can watch spin, you might want to watch it, noting how fast it's going, while flipping off circuit breakers. assuming it's a faulty load, and that it's mostly continuous load, watch and see which breaker makes the biggest difference in how fast it spins. that might tell you at least which circuit has the biggest load on it.

if it's not a continuous fault causing the load, but an intermittant fault, you might have to watch the meter spin while either the pump or the water heater or your freezers are running to see what's happening.

--sgl

Clothes washing in hot water is a big energy user. The heated water for a load of clothes is in the area of 7 or 8 KWH if you use hot wash and hot rinse.
So, a couple of loads a day could be 400+ KWH a month.
The dryer adds about 4 KWH per load to that.

We use cold wash/cold rinse, and have been doing this for 20+ years with no ill effects as far as I can tell. Not sure what the implications are for not using hot water for small kids though. But, using cold or even warm water for clothes washing would be a major saving if it can be done safely and works well.

The other thing you could do along this line is go with one of the horizontal axis washers -- they use much less water to do the same size load, so less water to heat.

Gary

The extra cooking would be in addition to regular meals. When making cheese, the temps are usually in the 112 degree range, but brought up to temp slowly. The burner is normally no higher than "medium" but for as long as 40 minutes at a time. How often varies with how much milk we have, but larely it's 2-3 times a week.

DW says she does about 40 loads of laundry a month, but that hasn't changed any with the move.

I stand corrected on the refrigerators; we had one less at the old house.

Most of you seem to agree barring any problems that it's not pumping water that has caused the increase, so it's got to be the extra cooking, the extra heating of water for maybe the additional dishwasher load, the extra refrigerator and maybe the hot water heater being turned up too high (we keep it high because it seems to get the dishes cleaner and that's important in handling dairy products).

Would those things combined bump us an additional 700-800 KWHs?

Yes, I think it would. Heating with electricity takes a lot of KWHs. You don't need to worry too much about what something "should" be taking, you just want to know how your monthly bill roughly breaks down. As suggested, get the power meter and test the appliances out in turn. You can leave the power meter on the fridge for a day or more to get a running average of what it uses. The stove and dryer are going to be more difficult as they probably run off 220 V outlets, but you can tally up everything else.

The electric stove and dairying could be adding, but you don't really have another option there. I doubt it is the biggest draw, but finding the power use breakdown in the house will help you determine how much it really is.

Drying clothes is going to be a biggie too I think. You should try hanging as much as possible. We hang all but the smallest articles and end up using the dryer for maybe 1 in 8 laundry loads. If the weather's bad the clothes hang on racks in the basement. It doesn't end up adding much to the work as you have to sort and fold the clothes anyway (ok, you don't HAVE to ). I think a dryer should be considered optional anyway.

Chris

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Chris DeVries
Common Ground CSA
http://csa.amandadevries.com

Are you placing hot milk in any of the refrigerators for rapid cooling?

ETA: Will your electric service come & do an audit for you?

Yes, we are cooling milk in the freezer for about two hours before it's moved to the fridge.

The landlord said he has a family member who installs pump systems and would have him check to make sure there aren't any problems there.

We also have an issue with the shower pulsing cold water every few minutes. Could that indicate a pressure tank issue?

I am going to try to be more diligent about usage.

I'm shutting down the computer at night now and the phone system. I know it won't be a huge savings but it should help.

I'm already hyper-vigilant about lights being left on, but I have at least one heavily used light (the range light) that I noticed isn't CFB yet.

One bathroom also has an automatic ventilation fan which runs several hours a day. I am going to stop that since all the windows in the house are normally open all the time.

I might be able to load everything from the small chest freezer into the upright if I organize it well and get rid of some things we are obviously not ever going to use.

When I make cheese, I could also start the night before and let the milk come to room temp naturally and then bring it up to the right temp. That would save time and money.

Anyway, we'll see what happens.

Thank you all for the excellent thoughts and advice; I greatly appreciate it!