(Please upvote this post to keep it at the top of the comment sections for information purposes)
First of all, this has nothing to do with the current energy price crisis.
Facts:
– We have 6,4kW solar panels that are new since 2020, digital meter, but no ‘terugdraaiende teller’
– We don’t have any crazy things like a sauna or a jaccuzi.
– We don’t charge an electric car
– We own a regular house that was renovated in 2015
– We don’t heat with electricity but with gas
– We’re a couple of 2 people, working at the office 3 days per week and 4 days per week from home. Our high consumers have special timer plugs to only use electricity at night or to use the solar panels.
– High consumers: Water boiler = 4kW per day on average and it has a special plug that only turns it on for 2 hours per day at noon, when the sun (should) shine.
We own a regular “rijwoning” house. We heat with gas and all of our electric appliances have been changed for more economic ones 2 years ago.
All of our lights are LED, we are barely at home due to work and we have a crazy high consumption. We’re just really fed up with it. We literally do everything we can to save electricity but we end up consuming more than an average 2 to 3 villas in stead of our small house.
We have had different electricians come to our house 3 times, changed our electricity fuse box and fuses. They always say: we don’t know what’s wrong, there is no loss, I guess you just consume a lot.
But we really don’t. We checked the street lights and they’re not connected to our house and our neighbours are ‘regular’ people so we don’t expect them to tap our electricity.
Does anyone have any idea? We’re running out of ideas… Or anyone who know who can thoroughly check this? A professional? Help?
OR, is 8666kWh normal for a small house where only 2 people live at?
Any help is appreciated.
Edit: question, could it be bad earthing?
When I walk around the house with bluetooth earbuds, it gives a humming sound whenever I touch electrical metal appliances. Would this mean anything?
That seems excessive, based on the extra info…
That’s twice what we are using (3 people), with 2 of them working from home (running 2 laptops, 3 extra screens) almost every day, using airconditioning, a NAS that’s always on, both a big TV and game PC running most evenings,…
This feels like something is wrong.
Have you tried any of those “smart monitoring” devices you can plug into your digital meter?
Turn off everything possible and check your usage for an hour or so to see if something is still drawing a lot of power.
Have you considered getting rid of your electric water boiler and replacing it with a gas powered “streamer” (doorstromer)? Keeping a large boiler heated all day is often a waste of energy.
It’s not necessarily a high consuming device that’s causing this. It might be something that should be consuming just a bit, but its malfunctioning or badly set up (old freezer with deteriorated insulation for example).
Just make a list of everything you’ve got running, and test their consumption with a power usage meter (preferably for 24 hours per device).
If the only heat producing appliance in your house is the boiler, I would still guess it’s the boiler. Look at your 15 min. consumption chart on weekly basis. Is there a peak in consumption at certain times?
As another user suggested, turning off different ‘automaten’ on different days and looking if there’s a huge difference in consumption might help you identify the broken circuit/appliance.
Are you sure it’s not the new digital electric meter? It could malfunction.
You can see the current consumption on the new digital meters. (Kwh) putt out all the fuses except for the one with the microwave. Then putt the microwave on at 900Watt, and you should see consumption on the meter of a little over 0,9 Kwh.
One thing you could do to narrow down the consumption is turn off breakers one at a time in your breaker box. Maybe there’s a power loss in some of the cabling, or someone is stealing power from an outdoor socket.
I have an analog meter (one with a spinning disk) so the immediate consumption is clearly visible. Is that also easily visible on those newer digital meters?
I like that quite some comments here suspect a Crypto mining operation the second they hear “high electricity consumption”.
Mainstream adoption!
Buy yourself some Shelly Plugs , so you can monitor the wattage of each outlet. Then you can find your main source of usage.
Man, best advice I can give you now is buy a meter for your wall sockets, that way you can measure exactly what each appliance is using. Maybe you’ll find your culprit, that or someone is actually siphoning electricity from your house for their Bitcoin mining operation
E: just buy one obviously, and then check how many watts each appliance seems to be using
Odd how it seems to go down every month, stays down as it gets to winter and then boom December comes in. Did you do anything different? Did you or neighbours have decorative lights up? Did your street maybe get lights and somehow they stole your power? This is pretty insane and it would bother me a lot even before considering what that would cost.
As people mentioned seems higher than one would expect. I believe when it was just me & my wife we had half that at arround 3-4000 kWh (for a small villa). Before solar, and when I was probably using my desktop more often.
I would question wether or not your fridges or freezers close properly or if they’re having to work excessively to keep things cold?
5kWh consumption a night does add up over time (1.8k kWh of the total). So that’s definetly something that should get checked, it must be something thats ‘always’-on that is draining that much energy.
During the renovations they didn’t accidentally put a torch into the wall that just keeps shining into the darkness?
While using devices etc… to measure consumption is nice I would start much simpler as some others suggested: turn off all your fuses and turn them on one by one (in 5-10 min intevals) and see which ones make the meter go ‘brrr’, 5kWh should be a noticable movement on the meter.
Something else to consider: I have a feeling our laundry machine while rated a++ still uses a lot of energy depending on the ‘wash’ program. (laundry and dishwashers can use hot water from the tap, but they will also use internal heating to get water to the right temperature).
I don’t know, but it would drive me crazy so please report back when you finally figure it out!! 🙂
I recommend you get a P1 port reader and activate P1 in my fluvius. It will give you real time consumption information.
i have a 16 EUR USB dongle but you can also get a Bluetooth or WiFi device for around 50 EUR.
You get 1 measurement per second.
Make a graph of the power used (in W), that should help you find when the energy is used. Is it a constant drain or a spike at certain times?
Then if you turn off circuits when the unaccounted for consumption happens you can locate it.
Edit: have a look at the 15min resolution graph if you can
Edit2: I also measure the load factor or cos(φ). A resistive load will be close to 100%, but a capacitive or inductive load will be around 50 to 60%. It immediately gives an idea on the type of device: a motor or a heating element for example.
Any pumps like in a fountain, or draining system?
I live by myself and have been home for over 4 years because of disability and use between 800 and 1.000kWh a year. You should get it checked out by someone that knows something about household electricity…
Do you have a more detailed graph. 15min?
First of all: you are right to Seek out help, this is waaay to much, especially if everything you say is true.
The fact that it is this high in winter tells us that it is probably due to heating. Are you 100% sure that you don’t have a heatpump? Besides that, only the electric boiler seems to be an option. How do you know it only consumes 2kwh per day? This seems low if it is for all your hot water and high if it is only a small one under the sink.
You haven’t mentioned your dryer. If that is an old model, it can consume up to 5 kWh per drying session.
If it isn’t anything of the above: there is something wrong. Your meter is broken or your electricity is getting tapped. It’s not light, it’s not computers, it HAS to be something with an heating element.
Source: i’m in the business of residential energy consumption.
A big bar I work at consumes around 12000kWh per year with high consuming refrigerators, espresso machines that stay on 24/24 7/7 and lights on during working hours 14h to 16h/day.
And Without solar panels of course.
Your consumption is extremely high. Check all installations, especially in the street! Something is very wrong!
I blame your electrical boiler. Those things consume massive amounts of electricity. Especially ones that have a build up of limescale.
I think you should start to measure things right away. People have already given some tips.
Going by your description, I would put you in the 3500kWh/year category on this page: [https://www.vreg.be/nl/energieverbruik](https://www.vreg.be/nl/energieverbruik)
So yes, your assumption that your usage is pretty high is definitely correct. First thing I would check is the boiler. Heating is almost always the biggest energy user. So start by checking anything that heats up.
Many towns also offer free energy advise. The type of advise can be quite different from place to place, but some will come to your home to measure stuff so you don’t have to.
this is what you need: it will allow you to track power consumption on any device or group right from the fusebox. the measurements are then tracked and you can access the metrics from app or webUI.
1. There has been evidence of meters reading out incorrect values, however you will need to prove this, so better apply next steps.
2. Get a cheap stroomtang and hang it directly after you circuit breakers – now work through each breaker one by one
3. If you don’t detect something, try it different time of day again
4. If you dont detect something, check the settings of your measuring device
5. Dont think of crypto farms, often its more simple, a fridge that doesnt work properly or a boiler that doesn’t shut down. In any case measuring is key to knowing on what circuit it goes wrong
6. Now in winter is a good time to measure all of this while the breaker for your solar panels is OFF, thats one parameter less that can screw your measurements.
turn everything off, and look at the meter. if it changes you have someone stealing electricity from you
CBA reading everything so this might be mentioned before; Since you have a digital meter you can view the live consumption of your house. I’d do the following:
– Disconnect everything or turn it off then proceed to watch your consumption is its still over 50 watts something is seriously wrong. I should even be lets say 20W from all idle LEDs etc…
– Connect a few appliances one by one and monitor. If your average consumption is so high the culprit will show up rather soon, keep on going until it jumps up a crazy amount. Note: Freezers and fridges and boilers tend to use power in spikes.
– Buy smart meters for all your devices and monitor them that way. My dad also has an extremely high energy consumption +- 7000kWh 2 people no solar. We found the small waterboiler in the kitchen using excessive amounts up to 10KwH/day.
I hope you find the problem, I know I’d be extremely frustrated.
I don’t have any advice different from the things other people already said, but I was wondering: you seem to have some nightly power injection as well. I found this weird, as solar panels don’t produce any power at night. For me, my power generation at night is almost half my total generation last year. I thought this was a software issue on my meter side, but now I see this in OP’s screenshot as well… Does anyone know why this is?
(Not sure if relevant, but I have the “enkelvoudig tarief”.)
@OP: I hope you find the issue with your electrics!
@op, I think it’s clear that you’ve caught this sub’s attention, we demand an update when you find out what went wrong!
So I live in Belgium and have been keeping accurate monthly and sometimes daily records since 2016. Here’s what I learned:
I have a house that had electric night heating (which was also connected to domestic hot water) and the dual meter peak/off peak tariff for the rest of the house.
I would have annual consumption as high as 36000 kWh. That was mind blowing my high.
Over the course of 5 years after realising this (three years after I bought the property) I replaced the night storage heating system with a air source heat pump, added plumbing for radiators (sized them correctly for low temperature heating) and put underfloor water based heating in the kitchen and living/dining.
I changed the domestic hot water to a air source heat pump with a self contained 200ltr tank which is more than enough for a family of 4.
I reduced my annual consumption down to 11500 kWh per year which is still quite high at face value but considering I have around 250m2 living space and the heating is really good now, this still sub 50kWh per m2 which is well inside the category of EPC A+ rating. We do not have gas in the house or oil so this is a very easy calculation to make.
So what I learnt is this: your domestic hot water and central heating consumption far outweigh the base-line daily consumption of things like tv internet fridges and washing machines dryers and lighting.
This base line should come in at around 4-8kWh per day on average. And we do a lot of washing! This almost certainly explains the majority of your consumption but it looks like you are offsetting some with solar, and to be honest what you generate offsets about half your consumption.
My domestic hot water heater uses around 3.6kWh per day, but the central heating air source heat pump on a sub zero day can use up to 80kWh just by itself. That is of course not necessarily used in summer, but in Belgium winter is 7-8 months long.
I don’t know if this is helpful but you seem to be actually in good shape – just that the numbers can be pretty shocking once you start looking at them.
What you need to watch out for is the cost of energy. The majority of your bill you cannot reduce because it is charged by the network for “transport” and this goes up every year – it’s the biggest scam of all. The actual cost of the electricity itself is relatively small. Look on your bills and you will see what I mean. Companies like Iverlek and Eandis are thieves and totally protected.
You can negotiate the price of electricity but as it is the smallest part of your bill you yearly costs will keep going up and there is nothing you can do unless you find a way to go off grid with home generation. I haven’t found anything like that yet.
Also even if you make your own adjustments to consumption it takes 24 months at least to see the benefit – because of the way that the meter readings are taken – they take them in Nov which means that it skews the yearly consumption figures to include mostly winter months. The way round this is to ask for a new contract starting may or June. This way your annual figures are only calculated with one winter period and a two summers. They will still get to take the meter reading in Nov but your annual adjustments will not be big anymore.
29 comments
There is in fact no more info in the comments.
(Please upvote this post to keep it at the top of the comment sections for information purposes)
First of all, this has nothing to do with the current energy price crisis.
Facts:
– We have 6,4kW solar panels that are new since 2020, digital meter, but no ‘terugdraaiende teller’
– We don’t have any crazy things like a sauna or a jaccuzi.
– We don’t charge an electric car
– We own a regular house that was renovated in 2015
– We don’t heat with electricity but with gas
– We’re a couple of 2 people, working at the office 3 days per week and 4 days per week from home. Our high consumers have special timer plugs to only use electricity at night or to use the solar panels.
– High consumers: Water boiler = 4kW per day on average and it has a special plug that only turns it on for 2 hours per day at noon, when the sun (should) shine.
We own a regular “rijwoning” house. We heat with gas and all of our electric appliances have been changed for more economic ones 2 years ago.
All of our lights are LED, we are barely at home due to work and we have a crazy high consumption. We’re just really fed up with it. We literally do everything we can to save electricity but we end up consuming more than an average 2 to 3 villas in stead of our small house.
We have had different electricians come to our house 3 times, changed our electricity fuse box and fuses. They always say: we don’t know what’s wrong, there is no loss, I guess you just consume a lot.
But we really don’t. We checked the street lights and they’re not connected to our house and our neighbours are ‘regular’ people so we don’t expect them to tap our electricity.
Does anyone have any idea? We’re running out of ideas… Or anyone who know who can thoroughly check this? A professional? Help?
OR, is 8666kWh normal for a small house where only 2 people live at?
Any help is appreciated.
Edit: question, could it be bad earthing?
When I walk around the house with bluetooth earbuds, it gives a humming sound whenever I touch electrical metal appliances. Would this mean anything?
That seems excessive, based on the extra info…
That’s twice what we are using (3 people), with 2 of them working from home (running 2 laptops, 3 extra screens) almost every day, using airconditioning, a NAS that’s always on, both a big TV and game PC running most evenings,…
This feels like something is wrong.
Have you tried any of those “smart monitoring” devices you can plug into your digital meter?
Turn off everything possible and check your usage for an hour or so to see if something is still drawing a lot of power.
Have you considered getting rid of your electric water boiler and replacing it with a gas powered “streamer” (doorstromer)? Keeping a large boiler heated all day is often a waste of energy.
It’s not necessarily a high consuming device that’s causing this. It might be something that should be consuming just a bit, but its malfunctioning or badly set up (old freezer with deteriorated insulation for example).
Just make a list of everything you’ve got running, and test their consumption with a power usage meter (preferably for 24 hours per device).
If the only heat producing appliance in your house is the boiler, I would still guess it’s the boiler. Look at your 15 min. consumption chart on weekly basis. Is there a peak in consumption at certain times?
As another user suggested, turning off different ‘automaten’ on different days and looking if there’s a huge difference in consumption might help you identify the broken circuit/appliance.
Are you sure it’s not the new digital electric meter? It could malfunction.
You can see the current consumption on the new digital meters. (Kwh) putt out all the fuses except for the one with the microwave. Then putt the microwave on at 900Watt, and you should see consumption on the meter of a little over 0,9 Kwh.
One thing you could do to narrow down the consumption is turn off breakers one at a time in your breaker box. Maybe there’s a power loss in some of the cabling, or someone is stealing power from an outdoor socket.
I have an analog meter (one with a spinning disk) so the immediate consumption is clearly visible. Is that also easily visible on those newer digital meters?
I like that quite some comments here suspect a Crypto mining operation the second they hear “high electricity consumption”.
Mainstream adoption!
Buy yourself some Shelly Plugs , so you can monitor the wattage of each outlet. Then you can find your main source of usage.
Man, best advice I can give you now is buy a meter for your wall sockets, that way you can measure exactly what each appliance is using. Maybe you’ll find your culprit, that or someone is actually siphoning electricity from your house for their Bitcoin mining operation
E: just buy one obviously, and then check how many watts each appliance seems to be using
Odd how it seems to go down every month, stays down as it gets to winter and then boom December comes in. Did you do anything different? Did you or neighbours have decorative lights up? Did your street maybe get lights and somehow they stole your power? This is pretty insane and it would bother me a lot even before considering what that would cost.
As people mentioned seems higher than one would expect. I believe when it was just me & my wife we had half that at arround 3-4000 kWh (for a small villa). Before solar, and when I was probably using my desktop more often.
I would question wether or not your fridges or freezers close properly or if they’re having to work excessively to keep things cold?
5kWh consumption a night does add up over time (1.8k kWh of the total). So that’s definetly something that should get checked, it must be something thats ‘always’-on that is draining that much energy.
During the renovations they didn’t accidentally put a torch into the wall that just keeps shining into the darkness?
While using devices etc… to measure consumption is nice I would start much simpler as some others suggested: turn off all your fuses and turn them on one by one (in 5-10 min intevals) and see which ones make the meter go ‘brrr’, 5kWh should be a noticable movement on the meter.
Something else to consider: I have a feeling our laundry machine while rated a++ still uses a lot of energy depending on the ‘wash’ program. (laundry and dishwashers can use hot water from the tap, but they will also use internal heating to get water to the right temperature).
I don’t know, but it would drive me crazy so please report back when you finally figure it out!! 🙂
I recommend you get a P1 port reader and activate P1 in my fluvius. It will give you real time consumption information.
i have a 16 EUR USB dongle but you can also get a Bluetooth or WiFi device for around 50 EUR.
You get 1 measurement per second.
Make a graph of the power used (in W), that should help you find when the energy is used. Is it a constant drain or a spike at certain times?
Then if you turn off circuits when the unaccounted for consumption happens you can locate it.
Edit: have a look at the 15min resolution graph if you can
Edit2: I also measure the load factor or cos(φ). A resistive load will be close to 100%, but a capacitive or inductive load will be around 50 to 60%. It immediately gives an idea on the type of device: a motor or a heating element for example.
Any pumps like in a fountain, or draining system?
I live by myself and have been home for over 4 years because of disability and use between 800 and 1.000kWh a year. You should get it checked out by someone that knows something about household electricity…
Do you have a more detailed graph. 15min?
First of all: you are right to Seek out help, this is waaay to much, especially if everything you say is true.
The fact that it is this high in winter tells us that it is probably due to heating. Are you 100% sure that you don’t have a heatpump? Besides that, only the electric boiler seems to be an option. How do you know it only consumes 2kwh per day? This seems low if it is for all your hot water and high if it is only a small one under the sink.
You haven’t mentioned your dryer. If that is an old model, it can consume up to 5 kWh per drying session.
If it isn’t anything of the above: there is something wrong. Your meter is broken or your electricity is getting tapped. It’s not light, it’s not computers, it HAS to be something with an heating element.
Source: i’m in the business of residential energy consumption.
A big bar I work at consumes around 12000kWh per year with high consuming refrigerators, espresso machines that stay on 24/24 7/7 and lights on during working hours 14h to 16h/day.
And Without solar panels of course.
Your consumption is extremely high. Check all installations, especially in the street! Something is very wrong!
I blame your electrical boiler. Those things consume massive amounts of electricity. Especially ones that have a build up of limescale.
I think you should start to measure things right away. People have already given some tips.
Going by your description, I would put you in the 3500kWh/year category on this page: [https://www.vreg.be/nl/energieverbruik](https://www.vreg.be/nl/energieverbruik)
So yes, your assumption that your usage is pretty high is definitely correct. First thing I would check is the boiler. Heating is almost always the biggest energy user. So start by checking anything that heats up.
Many towns also offer free energy advise. The type of advise can be quite different from place to place, but some will come to your home to measure stuff so you don’t have to.
this is what you need: it will allow you to track power consumption on any device or group right from the fusebox. the measurements are then tracked and you can access the metrics from app or webUI.
[https://www.home2link.nl/shelly-em-wifi-energiemeter.html](https://www.home2link.nl/shelly-em-wifi-energiemeter.html)
!remindme 1 day
1. There has been evidence of meters reading out incorrect values, however you will need to prove this, so better apply next steps.
2. Get a cheap stroomtang and hang it directly after you circuit breakers – now work through each breaker one by one
3. If you don’t detect something, try it different time of day again
4. If you dont detect something, check the settings of your measuring device
5. Dont think of crypto farms, often its more simple, a fridge that doesnt work properly or a boiler that doesn’t shut down. In any case measuring is key to knowing on what circuit it goes wrong
6. Now in winter is a good time to measure all of this while the breaker for your solar panels is OFF, thats one parameter less that can screw your measurements.
turn everything off, and look at the meter. if it changes you have someone stealing electricity from you
CBA reading everything so this might be mentioned before; Since you have a digital meter you can view the live consumption of your house. I’d do the following:
– Disconnect everything or turn it off then proceed to watch your consumption is its still over 50 watts something is seriously wrong. I should even be lets say 20W from all idle LEDs etc…
– Connect a few appliances one by one and monitor. If your average consumption is so high the culprit will show up rather soon, keep on going until it jumps up a crazy amount. Note: Freezers and fridges and boilers tend to use power in spikes.
– Buy smart meters for all your devices and monitor them that way. My dad also has an extremely high energy consumption +- 7000kWh 2 people no solar. We found the small waterboiler in the kitchen using excessive amounts up to 10KwH/day.
I hope you find the problem, I know I’d be extremely frustrated.
I don’t have any advice different from the things other people already said, but I was wondering: you seem to have some nightly power injection as well. I found this weird, as solar panels don’t produce any power at night. For me, my power generation at night is almost half my total generation last year. I thought this was a software issue on my meter side, but now I see this in OP’s screenshot as well… Does anyone know why this is?
(Not sure if relevant, but I have the “enkelvoudig tarief”.)
@OP: I hope you find the issue with your electrics!
[Fluvius screenshot](https://ibb.co/vJFCQhD)
@op, I think it’s clear that you’ve caught this sub’s attention, we demand an update when you find out what went wrong!
So I live in Belgium and have been keeping accurate monthly and sometimes daily records since 2016. Here’s what I learned:
I have a house that had electric night heating (which was also connected to domestic hot water) and the dual meter peak/off peak tariff for the rest of the house.
I would have annual consumption as high as 36000 kWh. That was mind blowing my high.
Over the course of 5 years after realising this (three years after I bought the property) I replaced the night storage heating system with a air source heat pump, added plumbing for radiators (sized them correctly for low temperature heating) and put underfloor water based heating in the kitchen and living/dining.
I changed the domestic hot water to a air source heat pump with a self contained 200ltr tank which is more than enough for a family of 4.
I reduced my annual consumption down to 11500 kWh per year which is still quite high at face value but considering I have around 250m2 living space and the heating is really good now, this still sub 50kWh per m2 which is well inside the category of EPC A+ rating. We do not have gas in the house or oil so this is a very easy calculation to make.
So what I learnt is this: your domestic hot water and central heating consumption far outweigh the base-line daily consumption of things like tv internet fridges and washing machines dryers and lighting.
This base line should come in at around 4-8kWh per day on average. And we do a lot of washing! This almost certainly explains the majority of your consumption but it looks like you are offsetting some with solar, and to be honest what you generate offsets about half your consumption.
My domestic hot water heater uses around 3.6kWh per day, but the central heating air source heat pump on a sub zero day can use up to 80kWh just by itself. That is of course not necessarily used in summer, but in Belgium winter is 7-8 months long.
I don’t know if this is helpful but you seem to be actually in good shape – just that the numbers can be pretty shocking once you start looking at them.
What you need to watch out for is the cost of energy. The majority of your bill you cannot reduce because it is charged by the network for “transport” and this goes up every year – it’s the biggest scam of all. The actual cost of the electricity itself is relatively small. Look on your bills and you will see what I mean. Companies like Iverlek and Eandis are thieves and totally protected.
You can negotiate the price of electricity but as it is the smallest part of your bill you yearly costs will keep going up and there is nothing you can do unless you find a way to go off grid with home generation. I haven’t found anything like that yet.
Also even if you make your own adjustments to consumption it takes 24 months at least to see the benefit – because of the way that the meter readings are taken – they take them in Nov which means that it skews the yearly consumption figures to include mostly winter months. The way round this is to ask for a new contract starting may or June. This way your annual figures are only calculated with one winter period and a two summers. They will still get to take the meter reading in Nov but your annual adjustments will not be big anymore.
There’s much more I could say…