major appliances

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Now that I have one summer and a few months of winter electrical data, I am able to predict the relative usage of my major appliances in these two pie charts. My data is the percent of typical daily kilowatt hours kWh used by these major appliances.

The big light blue section of the chart is everything else (lighting, ovens, washer, dryer, dishwasher, computers, chargers, power tools, plug in heaters, garage door openers etc, etc). None of these are used often enough to deserve their own slice of the pie so I have lumped them together in one slice. I want to focus on my heavy electrical users, the other slices, for now. But the everything else category accounts for over half of my usage!

My spreadsheet (.ods format) is here.

Starting at the top left, water heating is the dark blue segment. My old electric water heater accounts for about 15% of my electrical usage both summer and winter. The water heater actually uses more during the winter because the ambient temperature of the basement, where my water heater is located, is cooler in the winter. My overall home usage goes up in the winter months as does the water heater so it is about 15% the total year round.

The refrigerator (orange) and freezer (yellow) together account for about 23% of summer usage, falling to about 15% together in winter.

The furnace (green) is not active in the summer but makes up a whopping 25% of winter usage. Although I have an oil burning furnace, it uses about 620 watts of electrical energy when running. I last wrote about my furnace here.

Finally, the base load (red), the things that are always ON, accounts for 17% of summer falling to 11% of winter usage. The base load is made up of a whole bunch of things which deserve their own category. I wrote about my base load here.

Thank you for your interest.

George Plhak
Lion's Head, Ontario, Canada

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