How much energy do I use?

I started reading my gas and electricity meters about a year ago. I used to read them regularly many years ago and fell out of the habit. It's useful if for no other reason than to know if the utility companies' estimates are even close.

I subsequently discovered through David MacKay's book, the readyourmeter.org website. The idea is that you can enter your meter readings on the website (ideally on a fairly regular basis) and keep track of your energy usage, CO2 emissions and so on for your household or business. It's not the greatest website - it would benefit from being a bit more intuitive in terms of how to draw the graphs for your selected building(s). It is however a good idea in principle.

The other thing that could be done is to convert gas readings into kWh to make easier comparison with electricity. One's gas bill usually explains how to do this. The calorific content of natural gas is not constant across the network and a correction factor needs to be applied, however this is not usually very significant.

Anyway, from the readings over the last 12 months it seems that as a family we used 7500 kWh of electricity and 47000 kWh of gas. Given we are a family of six, that's not too bad - but if there were only four of us I suspect it wouldn't be a whole lot less. It works out at about 25 kWh per day per person. That said the gas usage is pretty high. We use gas for hot water, heating and cooking. It turns out as one might expect that the majority is used during the winter months for heating. We have an old, inefficient boiler - although replacing it is quite an expensive option. We live in an old house and the opportunities for improving the insulation are very limited - no loft and no cavity walls. We have for the most part switched to energy saving light bulbs.

What about transport? We are a one car family - we traded down from two cars about 5 years ago, mainly on economic grounds - and I started cycling to work - or in the winter cycling to the station and taking the train. That's about 3000 cycling miles and 2000 train miles per year. We cover about 6000 miles per year in the car - well below the national average, but certainly more than we need to. I fill the tank approximately every three weeks. I haven't done the sums to figure out how many kWh that translates to yet. Watch this space. Family bus usage is pretty limited. As a family we typically take one return plane flight per year to Europe. In the past I used to travel by plane fairly regularly as part of my job, but in recent years that has fallen to approximately one intercontinental and perhaps one European return flight per year. Again I haven't yet done the sums, but I expect that the plane travel dwarfs all our other travel energy usage.

I really don't have a clue how much energy we use in terms of the amount of "stuff" we buy - it's probably quite significant.

Of course, knowing how much one uses is one thing. Reducing it is another.