How much do you spend?

[Dorasmum]

I've been thinking we are always told to reduce our power/water consumption but what are the benchmarks? How do we know what is an average use and do we need to cut down? I know our average but how does it compare to other families?

So if you want to lay it down, how much do you spend per bill on power and water? I'm curious...

This is for a two adult two children family.
Power $120-$140 tops per month. Depending on if the aircon is in use. In autumn and spring can go down to $95ish.

Water is about $25 per bill. 6 Months I guess I lose track how often they come.

Ta muchly
Em

[Deesalie]

yikes...

our gas can be huge during winter $250 per month, but i refuse to be cold
during spring/summer it's about $50 per month

electricity is about $75 per month, but then we don't run a lot on electricity.

i don't remember the last time i saw a water bill....

[Tricia]

I received our electricity bill today and it's $102.50 for three months. BUT I think the charges are completely different for different states. It would be more meaningful to talk about how much electricity, gas and water you use.

So, I'll start by saying the averages for my household of three are:
electricity: 3.51 kWh per day
water: 292 L per day and
gas: 22.96 MJ per day.

[Dorasmum]

Yeah even after reading two posts I can see that the fact that I use electricity for everything including heating and HWS makes my result different to somone who uses gas for heating and or cooking. It's not an accurate comparison. I'm not sure how much in kWh it would be. I'll look it up....

Em

[marchbean]

I think it depends on the state u live too. We are in a rental with no gas and our electric is HUGE. When bub was a newborn in winter (day time temps rarely over 10) and we had to have heating our bill was $490 for 3 months And the house was still cold We don't have A/C

For July our usage was 35.0 kWh per day
(pre baby it was 22.8)
For Jan 22.8 kWh per day
(pre baby it was 16.1)

We have had a very mild summer and with a bub have had to use the heater as day time temps were sometimes below 15, wet and cold. We also use cloth nappies but I usually use cold water and we don't have a dryer.

I'm not sure about water. We recently paid one for $40. Before that I'm not sure. As it rains a lot, we never water the garden. My husband swims everyday so showers at the pool, bub only gets bathed every 3 days and me only every 2nd day in winter.

I would love to use less, but short of freezing the baby, I'm at a loss of where to cut down. We are moving back to Perth next month though, I'll be complaining about the heat then

[Dorasmum]

Heating is a tough one. I think the only way to use less power with heating is to lay out more money on an efficient reverse cycle aircon. We only have a duplex but it has an inverter outlet in the living room and easily heats the whole place and having it on 8-10 hours a day heating or cooling only bumps up the power bill by $25-$30 a month.
But then we're pretty close to the beach and it never gets very cold here. And we never had to fork out for the aircon because it's a rental.

One think we did mostly for safety reasons is to turn down the temp of the hot water system so the water in the tap is not burn temp. Still plenty hot enough for a shower and washing up but not hot enough to burn the kids. I think it reduces power consumption too. And I do mostly cold washes in the washing machine.

Em

[monstermon]

we get a quarterly bill, but we pay a fixed amount each month of $200, which seems to be covering each quarter's bill.

our average daily usage is 25.86 kWh (for our Nov - Feb bill), which seems pretty average for us, though our winter one is usually more - I guess hot water heating.

We have no gas, and we are a family of 4.5 (my DSD lives with us 50% of the time, so I counted her as .5 as we are sometimes 4 people, sometimes 5 people.)

Out hot water has solar piping out on the roof, but it has electric boost, and the temp can't be adjusted and it is VERY hot all the time - though the volume of water it heats is fairly small.
DP runs a couple of servers (webservers, mailservers) out of our house, so they are always running. Other than those things we have pretty regular appliances. Oh, slow combustion heater for winter heating, so no heating costs there.

I want to look into ways of saving more electricity, as our bills are probably going to go up again with the arrival of our next baby, and we'd also like to switch to 100% green energy, but would like to avoid the extra costs involved as well by reducing our consumption....

not sure about water. will look it up, but we have pretty full on water restrictions here, so our bills have been lower...

[sudevi]

I spend way too much on organic clothes and fair trade chocolate, I don't even want to think about adding it all up..

[Dorasmum]

The hot water is something I've been wondering about, we're getting a gas boosted solar HWS in the new house and I wondered if you can turn the temp down. We keep our current electric system turned down so it is hot but not burning hot. Are all solar HWS like that?

Em

[Craig&Kel]

Power is around $300 per quarter. The last bill was 21.51 kWh per day, but that was at the old house, and it was mostly fluro lights.
I wouldn't have a clue about water, we have only been here for a few weeks, and we had tank water at the old place.
I'm constantly trying to get the power bill down, but it always seems to be the same.