Anecdotally, my prof in the college sustainability engineering class told us that, of all the methods studied by the big utilities, the silly letters they send out turned out to be the single most effective means of decreasing the area’s residential energy usage – especially the smiley faces they added for the households who used less than average. I never saw this firsthand, but I’m inclined to believe him. He worked a lot in the space and eventually went on to found his own energy monitoring company.
In most modern-ish US households, random electronics don’t really use much power at all. It’s the HVAC that will really get you (air conditioning, electric heat, space heaters, etc.) and incandescent lights. Maybe EV charging if you drive a lot.
But also, in some places (like California), electricity prices have like tripled over a decade just due to PG&E’s mismanagement and all the wildfires.
If you’re a middle class household willing and able to pay your bill, no one really minds if you use more. It’s often the lower income households that are trapped cycle to cycle in old apartments using really old and inefficient electric appliances that struggle to keep the lights on, so letting them know that they appear to be using more than “normal” for their area can begin the process of them finding out why (there are often free energy audit and retrofit programs for lower income households).
And that’s in places with a modern-ish grid. One of my classmates’ final project was going to (I think) Nepal to help a small rural community understand why their power was always going out. Turns out it normally happened around dinner time, when electric rice cookers etc. would all come on at once and cause brownouts and blackouts. He worked with the government to install little “traffic light” LED indicators in each home to let the residents know if the grid is under heavy load at the moment. Apparently that was enough to distribute the load across more of the day, leading to far better uptime for everyone.
If you can just leave whatever you want on, and it’s not a big drain on your resources, good for you! We’re lucky But more careful management can be, for some people, the difference between being able to have power through the month or not.
Most frequently used things are always plugged in except for the toaster (in cabinet), my curling brush (in cabinet)
Our bill is under $100/month. The summer bills are as high as winter’s, because of running a dehumidifier 24/7. We don’t have central air. Sometimes we put in the window a/c units, which use a lot of power. We’ve only used fans for the last few summers. Our heat and water heater are gas. The dryer is electric, but not used often in the summer. I hang most laundry outside. Up north, we have long periods of darkness, so we are using way more lights from October - March.
I don’t think they’re trying to guilt you into using less or anything like that. I mean, what would the point be for a power company to make less money off you? I assume it’s supposed to be informational. Given your set-up and living situation, it does seem odd that your electrical usage is so much higher than your neighbors, assuming your graph isn’t too exaggerated. If I got a letter like that from them, I might have a peek around the house and the power meter, turning lights and appliances off, to see if anything unusual is going on. Typically, my graph is a bit higher than my neighbors, but it makes sense as we use the dishwasher every day and the laundry probably ever other day, along with the dryer.
As for the OP: There is nothing I unplug that I could think of. All my devices stay plugged in.
I’m not authoritative on this, but smart meters can figure out what devices you are using fairly well from my experience. Looking at my usage, it looks like it gets things fairly accurate based on my knowledge of our usage. I believe that I helped with the process by selecting the electrical devices in our house. Beyond that, not sure how they do it, but I expect there is some educated guessing going on. They definitely get our EV charging correct as I’ve matched it up with what the car says it has consumed. I expect 240V is easier to track because there aren’t many items using it, and they would each have unique “signatures”.
At least back in the 1980s, they came up with the idea of “negawatts”. That it was more profitable for the utility to persuade people to conserve than it was to expend the capital to build a new power plant to supply the increasing demand. Doubly so if new plants were subject to emissions or planning / zoning restrictions that older plants were not.
Fully depreciated infrastructure makes power at very low marginal cost compared to brand new infrastructure with large construction loans attached. When the utility regulator requires all power to be sold for one price, regardless of the cost of production of that power, strange things happen to incentives.
The only devices in my house that I intentionally unplug are the laser trackers for my virtual reality hardware; and that is only because I can hear them and the sound annoys me.
Some of our counter-top kitchen appliances stay plugged-in (toaster, coffee mill, fizzy drink thing, mixer), while others get unplugged (air fryer). Those that reside in a cabinet of course only get plugged-in when used (blender, waffle iron, insta-pot). All our computers and their supporting peripherals are always plugged-in.
I agree the major sources of electricity use in most homes is going to be the big appliances, especially heating and AC, and also laundry, water heater (if not gas). If you have a swimming pool the filter runs a few hours each and every day as well, but I am not sure how much contribution that makes to the baseline.
Oh, that’s pretty fascinating and I guess sensical, depending on the electric company’s time horizon. I would think over a long enough period of time, it would be most profitable to build that new power plant, but maybe “long enough period of time” is longer than I’d imagine.
My provider just told me that my “always on” devices constitute about 1% of my usage. Some of that is wifi, security system, etc. Some I could turn off, like low power LED lights. But I don’t think they use enough for me to care. (our bills are much higher than most, but our recent addition of solar panels has helped–at least in the sunny summer months).
We do the same as well: LED bulbs in all the household light fixtures (are incandescents and CFL’s even available anymore?) and the kitchen vent hood light and a table lamp in the living room stay on 24/7. The vent hood has a 100w equivalent bulb while the living room table lamp has maybe a 15w equivalent bulb. We also have 6 or 7 night lights with LED bulbs that are spaced throughout the house that are on 24/7. The power consumption from these lights is negligible.
We have some Scentsy wax melt warmers – those do use incandescent night light bulbs – that stay on 24/7.
We leave the desktop computers, the internet hardware, all phone chargers, the TV, the video game consoles, and probably some other miscellaneous bits that I’m forgetting plugged in. With the exception of the microwave, we do unplug countertop kitchen appliances .
When we bought this house it had a forced-air electric furnace that pulled 90 amps when running. Our winter power bills ran ~$500 per month. We put in a variable speed heat pump with a programmable thermostat and our winter power bills dropped by 60%. When the heat pump died last month and was out of commission for about 3 weeks, our power bill dropped another 40%.
All the small appliances, lights, and computers we have are nothing compared to the power that the water heater, dryer, stove, oven, and heat pump use.
Aside from the points @LSLGuy made, there is the fact that keeping demand safely below capacity prevents brown-outs and similar failures. If a generating unit or block of customers has to go offline, the utility doesn’t get to charge for any output or consumption at all. It would make sense if utilities prefer to operate at say no more than 95% of nameplate capacity with minimal risk of outages, rather than try to get to 99.9% with a high risk of outages.
I also used to leave the upstairs hall light on 24x7, but for some then-unknown mysterious reason, I had to keep replacing it. Turns out, LED bulbs and fully enclosed fixtures don’t play well together because heat buildup affects the electronics. I’m currently using special LED bulbs that are supposedly rated for enclosed fixtures. No problems so far, but it’s only been a few months.
It’s possible to make fairly good guesses by analyzing current waveforms at the revenue meter, along with metrics like power factor, etc. The meter sees all loads added together, but looking at waveform and other differences at step changes in load helps separate those out. Looking at load timing patterns, statistical analysis (e.g. hidden Markov modelling of load states), etc. can also help. In general this is “non-intrusive load monitoring”: Nonintrusive load monitoring - Wikipedia
Yeah, the innumeracy in those always bugs me. It’s not hard to do the math and see that the wall warts in a house cost less than a dollar a year. “But when you consider all of the hundreds of millions of people in the US, it adds up!”: No, it really doesn’t, because if you’re looking at all of the people in the US, then you need to compare those wall warts to all of the air conditioners and resistive-heating appliances in the US, and the wall warts are still negligible. Heck, they’re negligible compared to the amount you could save with just slightly better insulation.
But more careful management can be, for some people, the difference between being able to have power through the month or not.