Breeze Electric — Home Electricity Costs | breezerelectric.com
Ordered steps to measure the night-time base load, kill standby, and shift heavy loads — with watts and kWh figures at each step.
The base load is what your home draws when you are asleep and nothing is deliberately running: the refrigerator cycling, clocks, chargers, and every device sitting in standby. A device on standby typically draws 1 to 10 watts, and a household can run a dozen of them around the clock. That dozen is the base load you never see on a label.
Step one, measure it. Take a meter reading at a fixed late-night hour, and a second reading an hour later at the same hour the next night, when the house is in the same state. The difference over that hour, in kWh, multiplied by 24, gives the daily base load in kWh. Typical failure at this step: readings taken at different house states — one night the dishwasher was running, the next it was not — which corrupts the figure. Take both readings on nights that match.
Step two, kill standby. Work through the plugs: a device on standby typically draws 1 to 10 watts, and at 10 watts continuous that is 0.24 kWh a day, about 7 kWh a month, about 1.1 at the illustrative tariff of 0.15 per kWh. A dozen such devices is roughly 7 to 86 kWh a month depending on where in the 1–10 watt range each sits. Typical failure at this step: killing the standby of devices you use daily and then abandoning the habit within a week. Start with the devices you rarely touch.
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Step three, shift heavy loads. In most homes the largest electrical loads are heating, cooling and water heating, ahead of lighting and electronics. Shifting water heating to off-peak hours, where the tariff allows it, moves kWh from a costly period to a cheaper one without reducing comfort. Typical failure at this step: shifting a load and forgetting to check whether the tariff actually differs by time of day — if it does not, the shift saves nothing.
Step four, lighting, which is the swap with the clearest arithmetic: an LED bulb needs about 9–12 watts where the incandescent it replaced needed 60. A bulb running four hours a day drops from 0.24 kWh to about 0.04 kWh per day. Multiply by the number of such bulbs and the months, and the saving is steady rather than dramatic.
Throughout, keep the baseline from Read the Meter and the Bill: take two readings, subtract, multiply by the tariff. That difference is the only honest measure of whether any of these steps worked.
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