Earth Hour

PS_RalphW · Post by **PS_RalphW** » 29 Mar 2009, 21:09

Spent the hour singing 'blowing in the wind' and similar songs by (wind up) torchlight with a dozen 5 - 10 year olds.

Keela · Post by **Keela** » 29 Mar 2009, 21:47

Ralph - the mental image that conjures up is just priceless!

I imagine you all had a great evening. They'll all want to do it again next week.

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 29 Mar 2009, 21:53

We turned off our heating and all our lights, having lit the woodburner. We missed the live footage of the famous sites switching off: nice to see it on the Beeb.

Point taken about light and its "image", but as I've said before, darkness just has a bad press. Darkness is restful and undemanding, and the darkness of night and winter sets the pace of life.

oilslick · Post by **oilslick** » 30 Mar 2009, 02:01

biffvernon wrote:And it's been well forecast so the balancing engineers should know about it.

Do they recruit them from the circus?

Down in Oz, everyone drove out to the beach in their 4x4s, bought disposable glow-sticks and had a great time. They even turned some of the street lights off...oh well

Bandidoz · Post by **Bandidoz** » 31 Mar 2009, 17:07

Unless I'm mistaken (looking at the wrong stats/graph), there doesn't appear to have been any real impact on electricity demand (around period 41). You'd have needed to have checked the system frequency within an hour of the event to have seen whether there was any impact on that.

chubbygristle · Post by **chubbygristle** » 08 Apr 2009, 01:35

adam2 wrote:
emordnilap wrote:
chubbygristle wrote:for the likes of people who are actually bothered it won't make any difference as their houses are already very energy efficient and the inhabitants aware of such issues.
Exactly. I'm aware of the issues and of the 'Earth Hour' so what will turning off two or three low-energy bulbs achieve?

Question. We use around 4 kWh electricity daily. Is that high/medium/low or what for a two-person house?
I think that 4KWH a day is below average, presuming that gas, coal or wood is also used for heating. If electricity is your only fuel then it is very low.
I use about 2 KWH a day, if averaged over a year, all renewably produced. This is mainly for A/C in the summer, as much as 6KWH a day, winter production is much less.

In a recent battle with those dastardly thrupp lake filling didcot fly ash dumping eco-terror scoundrels, the all polluting and general scum of the earth misanthropists - npower, a friend of mine was told that the average consumption of a normal small household was about 8.5 kwh a day.

At the moment, our evil rented accommodation manages to suck up 6 to 6.5 kWh per day sometimes dropping to 5.5 kWh, and I am blaming at least some of that on the noisy nasty old fridge that is always chugging away and some other horrors which will hopefully be disappearing very shortly when I move house.

chubbygristle · Post by **chubbygristle** » 08 Apr 2009, 01:40

fair play to all those who used the hour for various shindigs and other social carry-ons. you're dead on. organising something like that is a much better way of raising awareness than just sitting in the cold and dark for an hour. having looked into it all a bit more i feel i kind of missed the point or got the wrong end of the stick with this one.

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 08 Apr 2009, 06:54

chubbygristle wrote:those dastardly thrupp lake filling didcot fly ash dumping eco-terror scoundrels, the all polluting and general scum of the earth misanthropists - npower,

Gosh, and how would you describe folk you don't like

caspian · Post by **caspian** » 08 Apr 2009, 08:50

chubbygristle wrote:a friend of mine was told that the average consumption of a normal small household was about 8.5 kwh a day.

If this figure includes heating I'd be astonished if it were really that low. Considering that a small household will use anything from 8 kW just for heating alone during winter, that would imply that the average household uses their heating for just 1 hour per day, with hardly any left over for lighting, TVs, computers, iPods, PlayStations, etc. I guess that the warmer months would reduce the average by a certain amount, but 8.5 kWh/day seems very low.

Adam1 · Post by **Adam1** » 08 Apr 2009, 10:27

This link may help:

http://www.bre.co.uk/filelibrary/rpts/e ... mption.pdf

page 4, section 1.

From the report, sorry about the formatting, there's no way to copy and paste tables.

Fuel Type-----------------Households (000s)-------Percent Mean------kWh p.a.
Combined Consumption-----20,510----------------( 100.0 )-------------22,290
Gas Consumption----------17,844----------------( 87.0 )---------------19,788
Electric Consumption-------20,510----------------( 100.0 )--------------5,282

caspian · Post by **caspian** » 08 Apr 2009, 11:46

According to those figures, the average household uses 61 kWh of energy per day

(of which 14.5 kWh is electricity alone).

And there was me feeling a bit guilty when our electricity consumption reached 5 kWh/day.

Adam1 · Post by **Adam1** » 08 Apr 2009, 11:53

caspian wrote:According to those figures, the average household uses 61 kWh of energy per day (of which 14.5 kWh is electricity alone).

And there was me feeling a bit guilty when our electricity consumption reached 5 kWh/day.

Yes, it is higher than I'd thought previously. I haven't read the whole pdf, so there may be some assumptions that push up the figures, like the definition of what a 'household' is.

There is some summarised data here, which is a few years out of date now, but which shows lower figures than those from BRE.

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 08 Apr 2009, 11:58

caspian wrote:According to those figures, the average household uses 61 kWh of energy per day (of which 14.5 kWh is electricity alone).

Yikes. That must be for at least six people in a big house.

chubbygristle · Post by **chubbygristle** » 08 Apr 2009, 14:53

caspian wrote:
chubbygristle wrote:a friend of mine was told that the average consumption of a normal small household was about 8.5 kwh a day.
If this figure includes heating I'd be astonished if it were really that low. Considering that a small household will use anything from 8 kW just for heating alone during winter, that would imply that the average household uses their heating for just 1 hour per day, with hardly any left over for lighting, TVs, computers, iPods, PlayStations, etc. I guess that the warmer months would reduce the average by a certain amount, but 8.5 kWh/day seems very low.

I guess that wasn't including heating then

- also it was npower so should be taken, like most things they say, with a massive overdose of salt!

PS_RalphW · Post by **PS_RalphW** » 08 Apr 2009, 15:03

Is that domestic consumption, or total energy consumption divided by the number of households - including industry, services etc.?

We consume energy every time the phone rings, but that is not part of our electricity bill.

My household consumes about 7KWh /day electricity (by the bill). We consume a lot more in our gas bill (more like 28KWh if memory is right). Our car (people carrier -shudder) is about 40KWh (7/8 gallon a day - estimate).

That takes us passed 61KWh.