I have an all-electric house that is about 3500 square feet, on 3 levels. I have a water source heat pump, 2 water heaters, 2 refrigerators, 2 freezers, and an electric car. Great place for a Sense!
I knew going in that I was using about 3000 kWh per month.
For some reason, my fan blower motor draws 1.5kW. I was running that full time, and changed it to only run when heating or cooling. That saves about 750 kWh per month! I need to find out from the HVAC guys why that motor draws so much power.
I also found that my Always On is 600W. I knew I had some garage lights and computers on, but hadn’t calculated the amount. I now have that down to 260W. That savings is enough to cover the electric car driving to work. It is amazing how quickly the always on devices add up.
After seeing the energy usage of my lights, and with a big sale on LED bulbs, I have now upgraded most of my bulbs.
I also know now that my old refrigerator (25 years) uses twice the energy of the newer refrigerator, but I’m not planning to replace it yet.
I still have a number of big devices that need to be detected, but I look forward to studying the seasonal trends of each device like heating, dryer, which well pump, etc.
What type of blowers do you have on your HVAC systems? Older HVAC blowers use a huge amount of power while the new ECM blowers use very little power. I know on my systems I have intermediate settings between always on and auto. I can set mine to circulate while runs the fan about 25% of the time on one system and on the other system I can set it to auto where it controls the speed as needed but have it either off, low, med or high when the system is not calling for the fan to be on.
As far as the fridge, I agree it probably does not make sense to replace a 25 year old fridge that works just to save electricity. My 27 CuFt unit which is about that age uses 870 kwh a year according to the yellow and black sticker I never took off. If I assume 15 cent power that only comes to $130 a year. Even if a new one used half the power that would only save me $65 a year, which would give me a payback on electric savings of about 30 years - not worth it.
The heat pump is also 25 years old. I don’t know what the blower motor is exactly. I do know it is a big squirrel cage fan about 30 inches in diameter.
I have also heard that a 25 year old refrigerator might be more likely to be running in 10 years than a new refrigerator. I don’t know how true that is, but it is hard to throw away a solid working unit that doesn’t cost that much more to run.