I recently installed an Emporia power monitor in my electrical panel. The installation procedure was fairly straightforward and took me about an hour or so to do. I have about half a dozen 240V circuits in the house which go to “power-hogs” such as the heat-pump, hot water tank, EV charger, Stove, heat-pump dryer etc. The results have been interesting, it seems the breaker size is a poor correlate of actual usage.
At the time of this writing, I have had my energy monitor installed for about two months. These were cold winter months, so we expect heating usage to be a bit higher than normal as it was cold outside. Lets see how some select loads look like in the app.
Interestingly enough the heat-pump is the biggest user by some margin. Using almost half of my total electrical usage. The car charger in comparison is only about 16 % of my usage. Interestingly the stove, which has the biggest fuse rating of any appliance in my house at 50A, has used only about 1% of my electricity usage.
If these measurements reflect the “average-household” after getting a heat-pump and an electric car we can draw some interesting conclusions. Seems that EV at-home charging is not going to be a big overall bump in grid usage. Certainly our grid sees bigger swings in usage on a daily basis than 16%. Further as at-home EV charging happens at night, when grid demand is generally lower, its impact on the grid is likely to be modest.
Electric car adventures 