The most common electrical faults in the home

How to save on electricity consumption? 

Many of us are already used to turning off unnecessary lights or taking fewer saunas to keep our electricity bills down, but the real electricity bills in your home can come as a surprise. In particular, ceiling lights no longer consume much electricity these days. In fact, modern LED lamps are quite moderate in their electricity consumption. 

Even looking at individual appliances does not yield big savings, as a refrigerator, for example, consumes about 0.5 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per day and a television 0.1 kWh. If you compare the consumption of an appliance to the average annual electricity consumption of a Finnish home, which varies from about 2 000 kWh in a small apartment building to about 40 000 kWh/year in a large electric heating house, the consumption of a single appliance is quite small. But small streams make big rivers! 

The most common electrical faults in the home

• Heating and air conditioning 
• Warm water 
• Refrigeration 
• Appliances and laundry
• Entertainment equipment 

Heating and air conditioning

Roughly speaking, heating consumes about half of the energy used by a household, water heating 20% and the rest is used for other household consumption. New houses often have electric underfloor heating, and some even have individual air conditioning. These can lead to surprises when the electricity bill arrives. For example, the air conditioning or electric heating in an apartment block consumes about 5 Wh/day of electricity, and the underfloor heating in a five-square-metre bathroom 2.5 kWh/day. One of the most concrete actions to reduce your electricity bill is to lower the room temperature. So lower the room temperature, at least in rooms that are not used much. A one-degree drop already reduces heating bills by 5%.

This will help you save on electricity consumption: Make sure you don't leave the underfloor heating on unnecessarily. If you do want to keep the heating on all the time, make sure the temperature is set to the optimum. For example, in a tiled bathroom, the best floor temperature is 22-23 degrees. It is sufficient for the floor to feel about as warm as a wooden table in the palm of your hand. After a shower, it is a good idea to dry the floor with a spatula, as evaporating moisture with heat increases energy consumption.

Warm water 

It may come as a surprise to many that a hot shower is one of the biggest electrical blights in the home. In fact, heating hot water for one person consumes around 1 000 kilowatt hours per year. Half of Finns take a shower at least once a day, and while the fastest people shower in five minutes, others can take up to 20-30 minutes! Even five minutes in a hot shower consumes more than twice as much electricity as cooking a meal on a conventional stove. Most of the water consumed during a 20-minute shower is hot water, and the amount of energy used to heat it could run an ice-box for 4-14 days. Updating the settings of the hot water heater can also have a major impact on electricity consumption. 

This will help you save on electricity consumption: An easy way to save hot water is to time your showers to a reasonable frequency and always turn off the taps, for example when you are soaping. Upgrading your hot water heater can also be a good idea, as a traditional direct electric hot water heater is a big electricity guzzler.

Refrigeration

Electrical appliances together consume just over a third of household electricity. Of all appliances, refrigerators and freezers account for a particularly high share, 13%, as they are always on. Did you know that the location of your fridge and freezer has an impact on your electricity consumption? Refrigerators should not be placed too close together, as poor air circulation can even triple the energy consumption of a fridge. When designing a new kitchen, also check that there are no heat-generating household appliances such as an oven or dishwasher next to the fridge, or that the sun cannot shine directly on the fridge or freezer. A heating appliance or the sun will also heat the fridge, causing the appliance to use more energy to stay cold. 

This will help you save on electricity consumption: New refrigeration appliances are far more energy efficient than old ones, so if your appliances need upgrading, now is a good time to do it. You'll save in the long run. And make sure your fridge and freezer temperatures stay at the recommended levels. A good temperature for the fridge is around 5 plus degrees Celsius and for the freezer -18 degrees Celsius. Even a change of one degree makes a difference. A degree colder in the fridge or a one-degree rise in room temperature increases the appliance's consumption by up to 5%.

Appliances and laundry

Appliances such as electric cookers, washing machines and dishwashers consume a lot of electricity. For example, washing and drying clothes accounts for around 4% of the electricity consumption in a home on average. For household appliances in particular, old technology can become an electricity guzzler over time. But today, new electronic appliances are generally energy-efficient and even light bulbs consume a fraction of the wattage they used to. If your appliances are getting on in years, now is a good time to replace them with new A+++ energy efficient versions. 

This is how I save on electricity consumption: Did you know that the temperature of your washing water can make a difference to your electricity consumption? Electricity consumption can even double when the temperature of the washing programme is increased by twenty degrees. Proper spin drying is also an essential part of ecological and economical laundry drying. For example, increasing the spinning speed from 1000 to 1600 revolutions per minute reduces the electricity consumption of the dryer by a quarter.

By upgrading home appliances to new remote-controlled and timer-controlled versions, automation can also make significant savings on electricity consumption.  

Entertainment equipment

One of the most common electrical wasters in the home is entertainment equipment. Entertainment equipment alone does not consume as much electricity as, say, kitchen appliances, but as the amount of electronics in households has exploded in recent years, the total energy consumption of entertainment electronics can already approach that of refrigerators. Gaming machines and desktop computers purchased for gaming in particular consume a lot of energy. Desktop computers consume significantly more electricity than smaller, portable machines. A new laptop can use up to 80% less electricity than an older desktop computer.

This will help you save on electricity consumption: The problem is often that lights and electronic equipment are often left on unnecessarily, leading to high consumption over time. So turn off electronic devices whenever you are not using them. Whenever you use electronic equipment, make sure that it is not left on standby. You may also be surprised to learn that chargers use energy whether or not they are charging the device, so even if consumption is not high, you can make small savings by removing the charger from the wall when not charging.