What’s the average kWh per day?

One of the first hurdles in generating your own electricity is determining how much you need.

Each home is different, there are so many determining factors such as home efficiency, size, average outside temp, and more.

Per the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) 2018 report, the average electricity consumption in the U.S. was 10,972 kWh per year.

Each state varies greatly, Tennesee came highest with 15,394 kWh and Hawaii lowest at 6,213 kWh. You can check out your state here.

It’s best for you to look at your own electricity bills to determine how much you and your house use per year, month and day.

With the above numbers, 10,972 kWh divides into 914 kWh per month, and this calculates to an average of 30.4 kWh per day.

However, it’s hard to draw conclusions based on these stats. This is just the average kWh per day, your daily figure swings quite a bit from season to season.

But from here we can begin to build a general idea of what your house is looking at as far as providing your own source of electricity.

With this in mind, it’s time to pull out your home’s electric bill.

You’ll notice that your electric company bills you per kilowatt, not kilowatt-hour. What’s the difference?

Difference between kW and kWh

Kilowatt is a measure of power, 1,000 watts to be exact (kilo means 1,000).

KiloWatt hours are a measure of energy. A kWh is a unit of 1,000 watt-hours.

Your bill is in kilowatts because that is the rate at which your home uses power. For example, a lightbulb is described as being 100 watts or 50 watts because that’s the rate at which it converts energy. (100 watts is .1 kilowatts).

The measure is the same for your home, just on a different scale. Your home is much more complex, but looking at your average kilowatts per day keeps it simple.

This way you can fully take into account the constant flickers of different appliances, lights, and units.

As a result, it’s best to look at average power use, which is the average kilowatts per day or month.

Here it’s laid out so you can see the rate at which you use electricity.

Here, you use 32.81 kilowatts. This is how much average power you used each day, multiply this by the days in the billing cycle, 32 and you get 1,049.92. This is your kilowatt-hours (kWh).

So at first glance, kW and kWh seem like the same thing but they are in fact different units of energy or power.

How many solar panels do I need?

Now that you know how much electricity you use, we can start calculating how much you can offset with renewable energy.

For solar panels use this calculator at go green solar.

You just input the information we found out, your state, and how much electricity you want to produce.

It’ll spit out how many photovoltaic (PV) watts you need and is invaluable for getting a good estimate.

Also for reference, the PVWatts calculator is excellent at showing you how much your zip code receives in sun. Surprisingly even here by Seattle my home still gets about 4,000 kWh of sun per year. Compare this to a friend’s house in Las Vegas who gets about 7,000 kWh per year.

Definitely worth checking out, even if you don’t think your area gets much sun!

Read more about solar energy and definitions on our home page here.

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