How low can you go: surprising energy hogs in your home?

[daverobev]

Ok smart aleck :P I take your point. But if you have a space heater, and it is turned on, and it comes on a significant portion of the time, it is going to be using 1.5 kW a significant portion of the time.

Generally they say 'should not be used unattended' I believe, so in theory one would know - roughly - how much of the time it is on. They would, therefore, be able to calculate roughly how much electricity is being used!

Space heaters use big chunky amounts of power, just like an oven, just like a hot water tank. If it's clicking on a lot, it'll be using a decent chunk of power.

[Sid Hoffman]

Yeah the best case scenario for space heaters in a residence is in places that are all electric (no gas, oil, wood pellets or anything else for heat) since it's a 1:1 comparison.  I fully acknowledge that if you have cheap natural gas and a high efficiency furnace, you're probably best off just setting your whole home to a sensible temperature.

What I was looking at was trying to determine where the space heater could make sense, and about the only thing I come up with is that all-electric home, but let's say instead of heating the whole home to 70 degrees, you lower the thermostat for the home to 60 and just heat a single room which makes up 10% or less of the square footage to 70 degrees.

I'm still not personally a huge fan of space heaters, but it's give and take because I also like the idea of only having to heat the spaces you're using.

[daverobev]

We have a very inefficient natural gas furnace in our crawlspace. Love it. Fixed fees aside, I think we spent $600 on the actual *gas* part of the bill last winter (including the 'delivery' bits). Replacing the furnace would be several thousand... and save us maybe $250 a year. Not worth it.

So ya. This year will be worse as our little one will be, er, one, and her room needs to be warm enough, as does ours.. and if we put two heaters on at once it trips the breaker. Oops. So it'll be 18°C in the whole house all the time. Ho hum.

[MoneyCat]

We were stuck with an inefficient fridge because it was the only one that would fit properly in the smaller space available in our kitchen.  I have no idea why fridges are all 26 cu ft or larger these days.  It's nuts.  I found that our other hogs were our Roku box and our old incandescent light bulbs, which I replaced with CFLs.

[nawhite]

Just measured the Irrigation system controller and it came in at 6 watts when off.
Other things I've found but decided I don't care about finding an alternative for:
2 watts for the Garage door opener
2 watts for the pellet stove when not running
2 watts for the microwave
1 watt for the chromecast

Putting my money towards a better fridge is a much better plan than bothering getting rid of these loads.

[Nate R]

Cable boxes are astoundingly huge drains on home energy use.  Ours was using about as much energy as our fridge before we cut the cable.

Just got rid of my DirecTV, and NOW find out between the SWM switch, the DVR and the other receiver, I was likely using about $5/mo in electricity alone to power these things! Not HUGE energy hogs, but I use gas dryer and water heater, so this turns out to be 8-10% of my electricity use!