My previous post on my electricity usage got me to thinking about appliances and how they use power. This is a chart of my usage today. The spikes are my electric range. I cooked a pork butt roast (actually, it's the shoulder of a pig) in a Dutch Oven at 275 for most of the day. I do this so the meat is really tender and just falls apart. This gave me an opportunity to examine how efficient the oven is over a long period.
Turns out, it's not too bad. As long as you keep the door closed and don't constantly check it to see how it's doing, the device works pretty well. Notice on the left there is a wide spike of about 5Kw to initially heat the oven; then spikes at about 15 minute intervals. There is a double spike at just before 2PM when I opened the door to check on it. These spikes use a lot of power, for a very short time.
![]()
Turns out, it's not too bad. As long as you keep the door closed and don't constantly check it to see how it's doing, the device works pretty well. Notice on the left there is a wide spike of about 5Kw to initially heat the oven; then spikes at about 15 minute intervals. There is a double spike at just before 2PM when I opened the door to check on it. These spikes use a lot of power, for a very short time.
I don't have an easy way to measure the usage over all since the levels change so much, but it looks like the oven is very efficient. Those little spikes, when expanded are less than two minutes long and shouldn't cause to much usage. They look really huge, but actually they don't represent much power.
Unlike the compressors for the heat pumps on the house which run for hours at a time in the winter and intervals measuring several minutes in the summer, this is an extremely short period. I need to measure some of the other appliances that really chew up the power, I may be able to reduce my power bill even more. Things like cooking in the morning during the week to build up some heat in the house to help during the after noon may work well.
But, winter is almost over for me. Notice that it got up to 82F today; this is the middle of January. I just love Winter in the desert.