Average Cost of Electrical in Germany

A few months ago, I noticed a electrical article which got down into the 2018 numbers....so I thought I'd essay it.

For an average family of three, you can figure that they use around 3,500 kWh as the annual consumption amount.  What this equals in monthly payments?  85 Euro (roughly 98 US dollars).  Now, you have to take into consider two key things.  First, very few people heat with electrical (most use natural gas or oil).  Second, the bulk of Germans don't use air conditioning (even in my village which is a fairly upscale and wealthy place...I doubt if you can find 3-percent of the houses being cooled in the summer).

How big of a deal is consumption?  A decade ago, no one paid much attention to the age of their freezer or washer.  The sad truth is that German products were essentially made to last not just ten years, or even twenty.....but in a number of cases you will find German products still functioning at the 30-to-40 year point.  But the sad truth is that that 32-year old freezer is using probably 100 to 200 percent of the power that a brand new system would require. 

So the public TV folks have been on this big hype for a decade now.....chatting about dumping older products (which still work) and going for low-consumption products. 

In my case, I have a dryer that I use six months out of the year....in the basement.  In the warmer months, I have a rack on the balcony and air-dry all of the washed clothing there.  This dryer in the basement?  I purchased it in 1998, and it runs just fine.  My German wife?  She blasts away each year around the electrical numbers audit, and is convinced that 20-percent of our consumption is due to this older dryer.  In essence, this winter, it has to go. 

I sat and watched some public documentary piece.....older German couple being audited by an electrical expert, and they came to the basement.  Here in the corner was his beer refrigerator.  Upstairs, in the kitchen.....the wife had a fancy new low consumption refrigerator.  Somewhere in the basement sat this 1960s refrigerator, which he'd had the compressor replaced twice and kept this system running.  The audit guy was kind about it but it laid out the numbers.....that one unit (over 40 years old) was consuming about 40-percent of the total house usage.  More or less....he was being pushed to 'dump' it. 

So if you bump into a German and they get onto the topic of consumption of power.....you can understand their preoccupation over the numbers.