As was said already,
No two people or families use the same power for the same stuff, even what we use varies day by day for different reasons. Did you wash clothes today, use an electric or gas dryer today, how many days of the week will you wash clothes, same number of loads each day you wash clothes or some days 2 loads and other days 4 loads, just 2 days a week? See what I mean. Do you have electric hot water, use hot water to wash clothes, a well pump also?
For example here more clothes are washed on Saturday or Sunday when we have more time, so more power is used on those days for washing machine, more power is used for pumping water from the well.
Mostly hung out to dry unless bad weather then the dryer gets ran sometimes, on those days more power used. Yesterday kid did 2 extra loads, probably more power used yesterday than normal for a Teusday.
What I just started doing is reading the meter everyday at about 4pm (as close as I can) and write that on a calender for each day. You can take any number of days, subtract readings, 10days ago from todays reading, divide by 10, and you have your average per day over a 10 day period. That is a good thing to do, writing meter reading on a calender like that, you can go back any number of days that you want right up to the day you started writing them down. So you can figure daily, weekly, monthly, etc..
From today at 6pm till tommorow at 6pm will give you an idea what your daily average is close to. Of course like I said everyday will be a bit different depending what you do.
If you have any major loads that only runs sometimes then those days will be far higher of course. When you know you used odd high demand stuff then make a note on the calender for that day also.
Reading your meter daily and writing it down also lets you know when you have a major change happen! For instance if you use all normall bulbs now and change to all CFL you can see quick (day or 2) about how much your saving on lighting. If you have a well pump and get a leaking line you don't see, you'll see quick your using more power with the well running too much.
I should have been keeping records like this myself for far longer, but I wasn't. I was averaging 570Kwhr per month for a year, after doing allot to lower my use I now averaged 670Kwhr per month for a year??? I was paying a year in advance and not tracking usage, so I don't know when or why it went up!
SOMETHING IS WRONG somewhere!! This is why I started the daily readings and calender now myself here. I changed to all CFL lighting (other than bathroom), I have not been using the battery charger on my portable stuff nearly as much, My main computer I went to LCD monitor and it's seldom on now anyway, another system went down and was not replaced. All this stuff that should have lowered my power use but something is eating more power than ever. Do to crappy grid power here I put half my house on a BIG UPS, perhaps the UPS is eating part of that extra power, but how much? After I do 2 weeks of readings I am removing UPS for 2 weeks and see what the readings say. I love the nice clean perfect power I have now, but how much could it be costing me?
My daily average was 17kwhr figured over a 6 month period, 570kwhr per month. Right now daily use is running 17kwhr on low days , 21kwhr on high days. I am trying to track that down! With all the changes made around here I figure I should have dropped 4kwhr per day to about 12-13 average, not gone up!
