Kilowatt Hours

The first step in designing a renewable energy system is to get a good idea of your energy usage over the course of the day. Kilowatt hours (kwh) is the most common measure of residential and business energy in North America. In fact, it’s very likely your power company has a kilowatt hour meter attached to the side of your home.

Of course, not everyone has even considered just how much exactly is 1 kwh of energy. If a 1 watt lightbulb uses 1W at any given moment, after one hour the energy used is one watt-hour. So 1000 light 1W light bulbs, ten 100W light bulbs or a single 1000W space heater each use 1 kilowatt hour per hour of use. If they’re only on for a half hour, it’s .5kwh.

When calculating your average daily kwh use, there are many sites online with kwh calculators you can use to get an idea of your energy budget over the course of a day. Be sure to take seasonal fluctuations into account when you calculate the kwh used in normal and high-use situations. Some kilowatt hour calculators require you to make the calculations several times to get a range of answers you can work with.

Even the kwh accumulation in unoccupied houses during the winter can be quite high if gas or electric heat is used to keep the temperature up above freezing, rather than geothermal energy heat pumps. The kwh used to run ventilation is minimal compared with generating heat for the air.

In fact, many appliances generate a great deal of waste heat that new technologies are replacing. For instance, the incandescent light bulb is rapidly being replaced by far more efficient compact fluorescent bulbs, amounting in tremendous energy savings in already otherwise efficient homes.

When most people look into installing renewable energy generation in their homes or businesses, kwh usage almost always goes down as a result of simply being aware of how many kilowatt hours are used and wasted in a given day. Even without keeping a kwh meter log of your daily activity, most people decide to stop wasting valuable capacity when they’re generating it themselves. Somehow it’s different when you just get a bill in the mail.

Because you power company has a great deal of information about your energy usage because of the kilowatt hour meters that are either read on a monthly basis or electronically report directly to headquarters themselves. They should be able to share the data gathered from the kwh meter(s) on your house.