Home Electricity Usage Help

The electricity usage tool is to guide you as to how much electricity you are using in your house for different purposes. The default data is for a typical household - your usage and your appliances will be different. You can edit the rows to suit you: for example you might have a fridge-freezer instead of a fridge and you might have an electric shower or an extra freezer. You may find sufficient information in the manuals that come with your equipment but I strongly recommend you measure as much as you can with an electricity monitoring plug (like this one but there are lots of others). You could buy one to share with your friends.

This page explains how I chose the default figures and how typical appliances may vary.

Most of the information here is derived from a survey of 251 households for Department of Energy and Climate Change - The household electricity usage survey and some from Energy Consumption in the UK which has interesting data on energy use by different kinds of appliances, albeit calculated by modelling rather than direct measurement.

The average households electricity usage in the DECC survey was about 9.9 kWh/day (without electric heating), but some used as little as 3 kWh/day and some up to 20 kWh/day or more. In 2020, OFGEM considers 8 kWh/day to be typical (2900 kWh/year). You can check your usage on your bill or take some meter readings. It is difficult to track down every little bit of electricity you use but you should be able to find most of it.