During the icestorm here a month ago I went and got a generator for my parents. it was a 5000 watt generator and it was enough to run the water, the refrigerator, some of the lights and the tv/vcr/dvd/satellite w/o problem. However it couldn’t run the water heater since that is 6000 watts.
Since a KWH is about 6 cents here and the electric bill is about $150 is it safe to assume an average house (or at least the ones here) use 2500 KWH a month?
I put this in IMHO because its a poll of sorts in case anyone wonders why its not in GQ.
In 2004, I used an average of 1670kwh at 8.5¢/kwh.
The low point was in March (1070) and the peak in July (2559).
I think the typical house consumes about 1000 kwh each month.
I work for a very large consumer of electricity ~450 MW and I have often heard that each MW is enough electricity for 1000 homes.
Therefore, my employer uses enough electricity to power 450,000 homes.
Rather than guess at it people could look to the EIA, which has exactly this sort of information.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/recs/byfuels/2001/byfuel_el.pdf
Numbers are whole-year 2001. Look to the line that says “kWh per household” and divide by 12.