Energy Usage

There’s an update to this post here, though it’s still worth reading the current post first for background.

There’s also a guide to finding what’s wasting electricity here

With the recent rises, and further predicted rises, in energy costs, I’ve been monitoring my usage of electricity for different things over the past few months.

I thought I’d share that data here, as it helps identify which devices use more electricity than others, and also how changing some settings can save money.

For example, in the table below you’ll notice the item I’ve logged the most is the washing machine. The main difference in energy consumption is how hot I’ve set it.

I’ve been experimenting with lower temperatures, and also no heat at all. Since the washing machine only fills with cold water, this is in effect a cold wash. So far everything has washed fine, usually using Ecover biological laundry liquid.

The other difference in washing machine usage is the programmes that I use. Fast wash is a total wash, rinse and spin of 30 minutes. Anti Stain Quick runs for 1 hour. Anti Stain Full runs for 3 hours. It’s interesting to note than when no heat is used, none of these programmes use very much electricity.

I’ve sorted the table by overall usage. It’s interesting to see that a fast wash of clothes with no heat costs the same as making 1 cup of tea in the electric kettle or toasting 2 slices of bread.

And looking at the cooker, cooking a pizza in my small electric oven currently costs around 20p, doing the same in the large main oven costs around 64p!

Since the original post, I’ve amended the table to include extra pricing columns. These show the cost as it was in May 2018, March 2021, April 2022 (current), and the expected increase in October 2022. With the exception of the predicted October 2022 cost, these are the actual prices I was paying to my provider in my region. Yours may vary slightly. As indeed will your appliance consumption, these are MY actual measured usage.

Looking at the highest consumption (pizza in the main oven) this cost almost 30p to cook in 2018, it is predicted to cost £1.23 in October 2022!

Enough waffle, here’s the table :

A point of interest is that I’ve done a rough calculation on how much it currently costs me to boil water for 1 cup of tea in a kettle on the gas hob. This seems to be about 0.83p compared to 1.13p in the electric kettle . That’s for about 250ml of water, clearly the cost difference will be more if more water is boiled. I’ll do some more gas vs electric comparisons soon I think.

There’s an update to this post here with more comparisons and considerations

And a guide to saving some electricity by finding rogue devices here