I hope everyone is doing well. With a majority of folks spending extra time at home or hosting additional family and friends, I’m sure a lot of you have seen changes in our home energy usage. Let’s share what we’ve seen!
How much has your daily and weekly usage grown since you’ve started staying home? Take a few screenshots of your weekly/daily usage or share some data from your CSV export!
I’ll start.
Overview:
I’ve only had my monitor for about a month, but the week of March 2nd is a reliable control when comparing to the following weeks energy usage. I began working from home the week of March 9th, so I’m leaving that out of the weekly average calculations.
Conclusion
For a normal week (March 2nd), my home averages about 48.1kWh
For the weeks I’ve worked from home (March 16th and March 23rd), I’m averaging about 78.55kWh.
Overall, that represents an increase of +63% since I’ve been working from home.
I’ll update this as time goes on to average together more weeks of data!
The drop in usage from the March 16 week to the March 23 week is explained almost entirely by my wife’s space heater to heat her office not being used. Since she worked outside the home (she’s a veterinarian and was at the clinic to see patients during the workday) last week, her space heater wasn’t running during the day.
Conclusion: it costs $0.40/day to keep my wife warm while she works. She is working from home again this week, and I can see a similar increase in consumption.
I’d love to see the data broken down by solar generation, home & grid.
There’s something in the Northern California vs Southern California chart that maybe hints at the solar factor. Then again, it may just be the weather.
A lot of us at Sense saw this too. Commercial energy makes up a lot of this.
We’re looking to see if we can get some high-level data insights on home energy usage to share in the next several weeks.
If you are referring to the upticks in usage in NorCal around March 7th, March 14th, March 23rd and March 28th, you would be right about the weather… Compare against my solar production (@JustinAtSense, here’s where it might be nice to get a solar-only trend chart).
March had solar production dips at those exact points in time - Rain and clouds. Usage is also up vs. Feb. Guess having two kids home from college starting March 10th would do that…
Our usage I think is different given the 50ish miles per day I drive with the EV. We actually have a decrease is usage with the car just sitting. We were on vacation during the middle of March but you can see the Tesla charging difference in the third image.
I’ve looked at the usage over the past two months. Nothing to report. I work from home anyways, there is no noticeable change in energy, except for maybe the garage door openers. I haven’t had Sense long enough to compare to 2019 March and April months. Energy usage is down overall, daylight savings time, warmer weather using less heat,etc. We are definitely cooking and eating in more but we have a gas stove so that activity isn’t being captured.
She is working from home again this week, and I can see a similar increase in consumption.
