How to determine your energy consumption?
September 23,2022
Let’s check first how to determine your total energy consumption. The standard unit of measuring energy is Joule. But when it comes to commercial purposes, we don’t talk about energy in Joule. We use KiloWatt-hour instead. That’s more convenient as the electrical appliances we use have a definite power consumption (in units of Watt or kiloWatt), and we can check their usage time in “hours.” We know that energy is nothing but power times and time of usage. So kilowatt-hour is simply kilowatt times hour (Joule is Watt times second).
Hence, the Energy consumption of one appliance in Watt-hours = Power rating in Wattage x Time in hours.
To convert it to a commercial unit of electricity which is kWh (1 unit of electricity consumption), you need to divide it by 1000.
Hence, Energy in kWh = (Power rating in wattage x time in hours)/ 1000.
Now, to estimate the total energy consumption of your whole household, you have to calculate the same thing for every electrical appliance and device you are using in a day and add them. And if you repeat the same for each day of a month, you can determine your whole month’s energy consumption. If you track this for several months, you can know about your household’s average monthly energy consumption. You can also calculate the average daily consumption. If the energy consumption is more or less the same each day, then you can multiply it by 30 (whatever the number of days in that month is) to get the monthly consumption.
Knowing the monthly consumption, you can estimate how large a solar panel you need to power up your household. But over the year, the weather varies. We all know that weather has a significant impact on the production of solar energy. So, it’s also essential to know the yearly energy demand of your household to run the system smoothly throughout the year. By estimating that, you can understand how much energy you need to store for the less-energy-production days of the year. That will tell you how many batteries you’ll need.
