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submitted 7 months ago by rmuk@feddit.uk to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world

Does anyone know a way of calculating the amount of heating I need to maintain an average temperature in terms of kWh of heating per 24 hours? Ideally one taking into account weather conditions.

I have a pretty big Home Assistant setup which includes switches for individually controlling all the (electric) heaters in my home. I'm also using an electricity supplier that changes the amount they charge every 30 minutes to reflect supply and demand. Given these rates are published at least 24 hours in advance I can currently choose a number of hours to run the heaters per day and have an automation automatically select the cheapest periods. I'm paying less per kWh for heating than I would if I was using a gas boiler. Plus, it's all from renewables, so working out that number of hours is the next step.

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[-] rmuk@feddit.uk 2 points 7 months ago

Thanks, I already suspected I would need to get Excel involved and this confirm it! The window thing you mentioned is very real - my place has single-pane 2×3m windows everywhere; their insulative properties are basically negligible.

Once I've got a reasonable set of estimates going I'll probably push the calculations into a Helper to produce daily numbers automagically. If it works reasonably I'll post an update on here. Thanks again!

this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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