The Department for Energy and Climate Change has this month published several new reports related to the Household Electricity Survey that they conducted in 2010-11 with Defra and the Energy Saving Trust.

The survey looked at electricity consumption in 250 owner-occupied households across England for a month, with 26 homes monitored for the whole year.

All the reports are listed on the Government website here. There are also some new interactive spreadsheets for readers to look at the data themselves.

One key finding was that many appliances were quite old (up to 41 years in one instance) and the average age of the kettles in the sample was 3.8 years.

Encouragingly the estimated energy use shown on the energy labels was matched by the measured energy use, except for washing machines and dishwashers which used much less than predicted, no doubt due to the popularity of lower temperature cycles.

The main report did discuss the idea of financial incentives (as proposed by Time to Change) and, although the sample is not statistically significant, it did set a figure on the potential energy savings that could be achieved by upgrading household appliances throughout the country.

One interesting finding, which was also identified in the AMDEA Surrey Study in 2012, is that householders who think they are very environmentally aware are not necessarily the most economical with their energy use.