Trying to understand

Daniele Landi
Living with 4kW per day in 2023
2 min readOct 19, 2023

Day 1
Today begins my experience of living with 4 KW/h per day. Obviously, before I start I need to understand what my house consumes, what devices and appliances use electricity, and finally my average daily consumption, so that I can understand how and where to reduce consumption. My house is equipped with photovoltaic panels that provide electricity flows, and the boiler is a hybrid, so I will also have to be careful about hot water consumption.

Day 2
It’s evening, today I made a list of the appliances and devices I use in the house, looked up their consumption, and calculated how much electricity they require.
Now, before I go to sleep, I have calculated and discovered that my consumption today is about 5.9 kW/h.

Day 3
I have to figure out how and where to cut consumption. Living at home with my parents and my brother I can only go and reduce my private consumption: television, lights, coffee machine, microwave, hair dryer computer and telephones.

Day 4
I decided to start in a drastic way, so that I could see if, by reducing the use of various devices, I could really go and reduce consumption to below 4 kW/h.
What I cut:
- I woke up in the morning and took a 3-minute cold shower, otherwise I would freeze.
- I did not use the hair dryer
- In the bathroom I only had a small portable light bulb on (which consumes very little and I decided to take it with me)
- For breakfast I had milk warmed on the cooker and no coffee.
- For lunch I had a rice salad prepared the night before (which did not need to be heated in the microwave).
- No television all day.
- During the day by necessity I had to use the computer and the telephone, obviously reducing the use of the latter for social and entertainment purposes.
- In the evening I only lit a candle in my room, and when it went out, it was time to go to sleep.

Day 5
Calculating where I cut back, I came to the conclusion that my electricity consumption yesterday was 3.8 kw/h, considering that appliances such as the dishwasher, washing machine and fridge/freezer I cannot control as they are shared.

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