Why does my electricity consumption spike at night?

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isaacladboy@reddit

If you have a tank and immersion heater they are programmed to fire once a day to get the tank upto 65c to kill legionella bacteria. It’s a serious safety feature.

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DigitalStefan@reddit

Maybe, but anti-legionalla temp cycling doesn’t need to be done daily. Once per week is probably more than safe enough.

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iZian@reddit

2.5kW is gonna be an immersion heater in the night. Or a neighbour stealing electricity.

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It_Wasnt_Mini_Me@reddit

Flip all the fuses off for a day and see if the house still uses electricity if so someone else is plugged into your electric as well

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IndependentClear469@reddit

EV’s charge at night when the power grid is under lower load

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Cryptocaned@reddit

Ha Westbury Wiltshire? High 5, I also live there.

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gavandeshaq@reddit

You haven't put any skill points into the energy efficiency percentage buff node.

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One-Program6244@reddit

Looks like they do have an EV but the image shows it's not plugged in and 2.6KW is going from the grid and feeding the house.

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Educational_Bug29@reddit

Granny charger will pull that much from the standard socket. Just saying

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MegaMolehill@reddit

I was just going off the daily usage being as high as 70kWh. The screenshot could just be with the kettle turned on.

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Peppy_Tomato@reddit

Even my washing machine will pull 3KW when heating the tub, and it's A rated on the new A to G scale.

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One-Program6244@reddit

I see what you're saying. The EV is such an obvious answer it didn't even occur to me to suggest it. If I was to ignore the numbers in the screenshot your answer would make perfect sense.

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CaptainValence@reddit (OP)

I should have mentioned we only just got the EV a couple weeks ago and this has been going on since we moved in.

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While you've mentioned that you've turned off the immersion heater, it does sounds like it. My neighbour had this same problem, no idea about high energy usage. They didn't get a house introduction, there was a switch in the hot water tank that is the bypass to manually turn it on. The immersion heater will automatically turn on when the temperature drops, which happens randomly throughout the day. They had it on for over a year.. until I've shown them.

To ensure it not the immersion heater for your hot water, you can manually turn it off at the fuseboard. This was to ensure no one in the house turn the switch on because it's not labelled, because it looks like a light switch.

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CaptainValence@reddit (OP)

That’s a good idea, I’ll see if I can find it on the fuse board and see if that helps. I remember when I found the switch for the immersion heater and after turning it off our energy consumption was the same for the following 24hr period.

This is the switch I found. Gas boiler on the left, tank and immersion heater on the right

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Yippym@reddit

Yours is labelled correctly and has a fuse and neon light, our build is a plan fuse switch and hardly noticeable than yours. If you noticed no changes I'm going on a guess, but do you have chrome electric bathroom radiators? You may have them turned on too?

For now just turn off the immersion heater from the fuseboard.

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CaptainValence@reddit (OP)

I did have a look at the fuse board, do I have 2 water heaters? What’s going on here? I don’t have any electric bathroom radiators. I do have 2 showers which are controlled by an electric panel but I don’t think they’re electric showers.

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Yippym@reddit

You got a timer that linked to your Hive, and a manual electric bypass. Is my guess, but they should of hooked it to your gas.

Just turn them both off, then check if the hot water actually use the gas boiler to heat up. My house has a electric bypass, and uses the gas with the thermostat control

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Sprkz139@reddit

Go to fuse board and turn off a circuit at a time and watch the myenegi app to see when the load drops off. That’ll give you a starting point to look for whatever’s using the load.

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Peppy_Tomato@reddit

Looks like you have an EV. Most houses don't have an EV, so you can't expect your consumption to be similar to them. Does your consumption line up with what you add to your EV?

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CaptainValence@reddit (OP)

I should have mentioned we only just got the EV a couple weeks ago and this has been going on since we moved in.

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Peppy_Tomato@reddit

You might be focusing on the wrong things here.

Do you run your dishwasher overnight? When the appliance is heating the water, the energy will spike. Same with a washing machine. Your gas boiler too. It needs electricity to operate the pump and the control machinery.

I don't know if I would trust your EV monitoring system to accurately read your household electricity consumption. Check the data on your smart meter. Install an app called Loop Energy which reads and charts your household energy consumption straight from your smart meter, and then see if you notice any anomalies.

Just for context, I don't have an EV, but I use 6K+ KWh per annum, and that's because of all my tech stuff that rarely gets powered off.

My so-called phantom load (in the dead of night with just the baseline stuff is around 450W. I'm too lazy to optimize that any further, so I just pay the price. The Loop app van calculate and tell you what your base/phantom load is, and you can find out what things you need to prioritise powering off. I got some energy monitoring smart plugs for a few things just to keep an eye on the energy usage of them specifically, and to be able to power them off from my phone if needed

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