I've been tracking the power meter readings at my mum's house for the last 10 months or so, while my house is being built. So I can have a baseline to work against when we move in.
Looking at the spreadsheet now, it looks like an average of 0.92kWh per hour, or 22.15kWh per day. I can attach the spreadsheet if people want to use it - it tells me the cost and a bunch of averages and stuff. There was a gap of 3 months in there, though, so I lost the daily trend I was trying to get. But recently I've been a bit better.
Of course my house will be much smaller than mum's, so hopefully it'll be easier to keep the usage down.
Last week I tried an experiment where I turned almost everything off (the fridges, my laptop, and a radio were left on) and left the house for a couple of hours. That cost $0.05 per hour, and used 0.337kWh per hour. Then I came home and turned everything on. That cost $0.30 per hour and used 1.959kWh per hour! (I suspect most of that was the airconditioning.)
Anyway, it is a bit of a pain to have to go outside to take a photo of the meter (I use the timestamp to get the exact time between readings), so I'm looking into something like a kill-a-watt for my house. Perhaps something like the MPGuino? It would be useful for electric cars, too.
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