Electricty usage - understanding it via a gadget

[Oceanic]

Hi

I'm not in the UK but in Sweden, but this should be fairly straightforward I hope.

My electricity bill is pretty huge at the moment and I'm trying to find ways to cut it down before I start exploring ways to do things cheaper in my house like geothermal heating and solar, I thought it best to actually ensure I can get my house operating at the lowest optimal kWh usage. Just for info, over winter months we are using nearly 4000 kWh per month for all of our electricity, heating and water heating as well as heating up my hot tub and the very rare sauna.

So, I thought on my journey to lower electricity bills the best thing to do would be to get a handle on our usage. I came across this https://sense.com/product.html but it seems geared to the US market, I know other devices/systems exist in Europe and I guess that is what I'm asking for here, recommendations of the best energy monitoring solution?

Thanks

[Oceanic]

Hi all,

It is expensive and is costing me near £400 per month, this electricity bill is probably a little higher as my wife is at home at the moment with our first child so there are various extra usages happening such as laundry, TV, lighting being used which might not otherwise.

Even so, I'm on a mission to try and get this down as much as possible.

I think I'm paying a good rate for my electric as I managed to get on friends and family deal with a friend who work for an electric company, the KWH price we managed to lock in on a fixed 3 year deal as it was cheaper than anything on the comparison sites here.

I have quotes for geothermal heating, which is x3 more efficient than the heating I have right now, electric radiators in each room. The house is just over 200sqm

So, to start with I want to identify the main culprits aside from the hot tub and sauna. So that's why I'm looking into these smart meters, so any other suggestions would be very much welcome.

Edited by Oceanic on Friday 9th February 12:25

[Oceanic]

MXRod said:

I use one of these
https://www.amazon.co.uk/geo-Minim-Electricity-Ene...
Simple to install , It gives readouts in Kw actual usage, or accumulative usage . and once programed with tariffs , cost per hour/day/month .
It will soon show you where your power is going

Does it tell you what actual devices are chewing up the electricity usage, or is just an overall consumption that it offers?

[Oceanic]

Evanivitch said:

You'd need a monitoring device for each device you need to monitor.

Otherwise you just go around switching things off to see what difference they make. However I suspect the hot tub isn't always drawing power.

Is your hot tub well insulated?

Yeah, I took a look at the hot-tub when we bought this place last year and it's relatively new, there appears to be quite a lot of insulation in there. I think there might be more I can do with the timing settings, but that is a trade off between maintaining temp and heating.