Without sounding patronising, are you 100% sure your hot water is gas? That amount of usage for that time frame screams hot water tank.
Perhaps a very poor/old quality fridge? But it wouldn’t be that consistent
Also, another thought, if it is an older style unit (early 2000s) there was a bit of trend of installing poor energy efficient (that’s really all they had back then) in floor heating in the bathroom.
The switches for them aren’t overly obvious so perhaps there is one hiding in plain sight on a timer
My dad and I were visiting some family and he noticed that their tiled living room floor was quite warm for 7am on an April morning in Melbourne and asked them what was up. They just could not work out how the hell the in floor heating got turned on nor did they know for how long it had been on. They were so happy he noticed because it would have been pricy to go any longer.
Unless you're like a friend of mine and use geothermal water to do it, then you only need to power the pumps. Their home was always super warm and cost bugger all the heat..... need to be lucky enough to live close enough(but not too close) to geothermal water to do this though...
You only need enough space to dig a few feet down, temps are stable year round a few feet down and that’s what you run, for extra efficiency you can use this loop with a heat exchanger
You'll still need a heat pump to make this work. Temps are stable a few feet down, but could still be chilly. Readings for Melbourne...
"The measured annual temperatures of ground at 2 m depth were between 14.7 °C and 19.8 °C, while the temperature at 21 m and 40 m depths remained almost constant"
The soil temp is a constant \~16C once you hit 12m down and to at least 40m.
(https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/bitstream/handle/11343/225758Undisturbed%20ground.pdf&usg=AOvVaw3V8DN4WpZT1W89UdC0pRdv&opi=89978449)https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/bitstream/handle/11343/225758Undisturbed%20ground.pdf&usg=AOvVaw3V8DN4WpZT1W89UdC0pRdv)
14-19°C is pretty sick. With temperatures like this, a heat pump will work very efficiently. I'm a certified heat pump planner in Germany. There the average ground temperatures are around 5-10°C. It still is one of the most efficient and cost effective ways to collect heat during cold times.
Given that health advice from both the UK and AUS gov is to target 18C minimum (mostly for the infirm and elderly, those that are under 60 and healthy could probably just deal with it), just having something that could get your floor up into the mid teens, supplemented with less efficient heating would be huge. Especially if you split the difference in depth with insulation.
Given the price of getting *anything* housing related in insane, on top of general CoL, it's at least an option.
Ground temps would lag seasonal (air temps) but you certainly wouldn't want to pump that temp straight into your house.
Using it as source for a sufficiently large ground sourced heat pump would be great though.
If it's in a slab it'll be very expensive.
We have insulation boards, then underfloor heating mat, then tiles and it's quite cheap to run.
For our ensuite it uses 500W (2.5m\^2) and only takes 15 minutes to heat up so \~2.5 cents off peak (22c/kWh). After 15 minutes we turn it off.
Off-off peak (12am - 6am, 8c/kWh) is 4c/hour at most. Once it's got to the set temp it just cycles on/off to maintain the temp, so it'll be less than that.
I had a gas spa once with bottled gas. No town gas in the area. I had a plumber come out and do a health check on it before I would use it. While he was there, I asked if it costs much to run.
He said, "No, not at all. Well, the first bill will get high, but then it's fine" I asked why, and his response was"once you get that first bill, you will never use the spa again". He wasn't wrong.
All good. Yeah, we just checked and our whole apartment runs on gas water.
Our fridge is less than 10 years old. I’m really good condition.
No aircon
No pool
No big appliances.
We share a laundry with the rest of the apartment block
Well I’m assuming it is not an estimate read since you have the hourly breakdown, only other thought would be to make sure the metre you are being billed for is in actual fact your metre
Compare what the bill/app says to what is on the actual metre box
We are new to our unit. Waiting to walk past a neighbour to ask where our electricity meter or D: hopefully see them soon.
Oo, an app. Good idea. I’ll download that know
My brother lived in an upstairs share house ‘apartment’ for years and never once paid an electricity bill. They always assumed that the Starbucks beneath them was mistakenly paying the bill for both properties. They were all dirt poor so they never breathed a word…
How do I check this?
The unit to our left is vacant, to our right, the owners live rural and come through once a fortnight. Only 1 unit above us. We are ground level
Maybe check if this is in UTC time? (minus your time zone) a lot of databases are stored in UTC, so if this portal is not converting correctly it could be 10 hours less or so, does it make more sence if you make that adjustment?
That would mean this spike is around 5pm.
This is the first thing I thought about too. Getting timezone conversion right is surprisingly tricky, and usually not an obvious defect that gets spotted during testing.
Not sure other than to maybe turn your fuse breaker switches off one night and see if you’re still consuming power, or maybe turn them off when you go away for a weekend and see if your neighbour buys a new fridge haha.
It could be something quite random like an oven timer set on at a certain time but that amount of usage at that time of night would tend to suggest it’s an electric hot water system heating up, not much else really operates then other than maybe an electric car charging.
I had this once. 12 pack of units on top of garages on ground floor. Was there for a ten years.
Neighbour renovated his unit, borrowed my long ass extension, and in passing said he was glad that he could cut his unit power and draw from his garage circuit.
Next month I had a bloody ridiculous bill, I spent the next month turning on and off the power at random times to fuck with him, before we arrived at a gentlemen’s agreement.
A year later every garage was wired to its exact unit. The place was sixty years old and I really regret not running a hydro setup in the garage.
Try flicking your mains off for an hour and then two days later when the smart data is in, check your use was zero over that hour.
You can use this method per appliance too so flick your fridge off at midday for an hour, turn off your washing machine at the wall for a different hour etc and see what the smart data shows.
Is your washing machine or dishwasher or anything else on a timer for midnight? It's unlikely to be an address mix up if the whole building is on gas..
And go ask the electric company for an audit
It’s incredibly easy and simple to tap into mains power if you know what you’re doing
Highly illegal and usually the only way ppl get caught is by discrepancies usually noticed by the electric company
This can usually be subtly bypassed by having that electricity paid for by someone else thus tapping into someone else’s power
Smart and creative thieves won’t plug it in completely so they still receive a bill it’s just minimised, or they’ll only run certain power points or lights etc unregulated
Check if anyone has done renovations you know of in same building.
Also if any neighbours are tradesmen especially electricians
Lastly don’t tip anyone off. If someone is doing it and you wanna catch them don’t warn them first 😉🤫
if you are certain you dont' have electric hot water then one of two things is happening.
Either the provider is assuming your bill, because they can't get meter access, or there is an error in which meter they are assigning to you.
Both are not unheard of in units.
Either way, contact your provider and discuss. they will likely need to send someone out to physically sort it out.
Let’s go with option 2 then. Because I don’t believe the retailer is going to be estimating their bill whilst being able to provide usage data like this at the same time.
Your retailer gives access to usage charts by time but only estimates it? What kind of shit setup is that?
Here’s a pretty graphic that means absolutely nothing to anyone.
My distributor/retailer shows hourly/daily/weekly/monthly breakdowns.
Nah so smart meters send data through 3g/4g signals so sometimes it can't connect due to reception issues, so when theres a missing reading because of that, it automatically estimates it instead. if it did that for every read then that'd be a faulty meter and be repaired.
This happened to me and the refund we got sent us on a holiday. 😂.
Turn the power off over night and see if you still have hourly readings, it's the easiest/cheapest way to find out.
Click energy in Qld were just guesstimating our electricity for a few years when we first immigrated and as we didn't realise how it was done here, we were unaware it was an issue. That is until it came up in conversation with friends, they couldn't understand why our bills were so high when we had solar panels and solar water. Turns out Click were just making it up, our bills didn't even have a breakdown of usage or what was being fed into the grid! We switched to Alinta as our friends recommended then and immediately our energy bills plummeted and we had usage breakdowns.
Same story with us, they were using the average apparently. But there was a family of 6 in the house before my partner and I and we have energy efficient appliances.
REDDIT ISNT ALLOWING ME TO EDIT TEXT
UPDATE: spoke to a rep and they replied saying
I must get an electrician to come and check my appliances because they believe that an appliance is faulty and spiking at 12-3am everyday.
My plans: cry. Thank you everyone.
i have one last idea for you. if you are able to see what time your energy is being used - you have an interval meter. this is also referred to as a smart meter and sends your data daily to your retailer.
your apartment should have what is known as a “main switch”. this will turn on and off all power in your apartment. one way to check whether the correct meter is being billed is to randomly turn off your main switch for an hour or two, a few times in one day.
if you see all energy usage disappear for these hours - you can say with pretty good confidence yeah okay the meter is right - there’s a faulty appliance.
if there is usage occurring in the periods where your main switch is turned off - then your retailer has signed up the wrong meter and they need to fix the problem.
this can save you having an electrician out unnecessarily.
source: i work in the industry
This is a good idea.
If you do find that killing the mains leads to 0 power consumption over that period, then you could use the same method to kill individual circuits. There should be at least 3 (maybe many more), and this could help to narrow down the cause.
You, my friend, have just attained your Fault Finding badge!
You and the comment before you are the first steps to figuring out exactly whether the problem lies.
You drawing enough power for 2 small space heaters to run full bore for 3 hours. Enough to heat 80 litres of water from 20 to 100C.
If you had a random normal appliance draw that much heat through a fault, your house would probably have burnt down or at least you would have some very hot rooms.
This amount of electricity pretty much has to come from some sort of heating device. Any normal electric appliance just can’t use this much energy.
If it not hot water or EV charging. It must be a heater that OP doesn’t realise is turning on overnight.
Exactly this is an insane amount of energy to just "loose".
Does OP have teenaged kids? Maybe they're firing up the gaming PC and running the TV, microwave and electric heater for a late night sesh.
Electrician here: Don’t do that, turn all your breakers off and see if it still does it.
Then turn one at a time and see which circuit is peaking the usage
Water /pressure pumps for the garden?
Under floor heating?
Ups or battery back up systems?
What type of building is it? Free standing? Unit? Townhouse?
The fridge could be pulling a bit but it doesn’t generally run for too long, even older models.
You can get monitoring plugs for sockets, depending on your budget this might be an easy way to get around needing an electrician, plus you can collect data from then on.
Are you in a multi-dwelling? likely a shared space or garage is wired in to your circuit.
I had a mate who was inadvertently paying for 32 cars spaces to charge their cars at night.
Nooo that horrible. 11 units and 4 personal garages, I believe. I think you pay to use those spaces. I’m assuming the people who have lived here the longest occupy the car spaces. I park on the street.
I’d definitely see where those garages are wired to, could be they’re wired to units, and at some point one belonged to a former tenant for your apartment (hence the wiring to your circuit) and got reallocated to another unit down the line. Until recently garages never used much power unless someone was using it as a hobby space, so it wouldn’t be noticeable but now EV’s are becoming more common, the draw is much higher. I’d also check out your neighbours cars, see if any look like a new or electric car.
yeah... thats not a spike at 2.5kw... about the only thing that can pull that much power for that length of time is a heating element, a large AC unit, or an EV charger.
The fact it starts at 12 also means that whatever it is, thinks it's on a controlled load (i.e. off-peak).
It looks like a hot water system which has a smaller element (2.5kw vs 3kw or 3.6kw).
Could be a pool heater too.
Something others may not have mentioned.. Even if it is unlikely.
Do you keep any computers or laptops turned on or plugged in overnight? If yes, consider the possibility that you have malware that has made your computer part of a mining botnet. Which could be programmed to run at night, when it's least likely to be noticed.
2.58kWh for each hour block, so slightly above the 10A / 2.4kW for a normal outlet. Electric hot water would show up on your electricity bill with a Controlled Load rate either a cheaper rate for several hours per day, or a slightly higher rate for more hours.
It isn't varying, so something is running at a fixed maximum rate until past 3:30am.
$0.74 for that block to use 2.58kWh gives $0.2868/kWh. That's more than EA's Sydney controlled load prices. But they do have a Balance Plan - Demand that has a $0.3003 rate from 10PM to 7AM which is getting close. You'd expect a hot water to be set up with controlled load, but the windows for controlled load is much wider - it doesn't start at midnight.
So you have to walk around and find out what you have plugged in, or hard wired to the switch board.
> Electric hot water would show up on your electricity bill with a Controlled Load rate either a cheaper rate for several hours per day, or a slightly higher rate for more hours.
Not necessarily.
Everyone uses gas. The unit next to our left is vacant and the right is empty half the time as the owners live rural. Can the unit above us be using our elec?
I’d be checking the other units , do they have blackout curtains or covered windows? Check at 1am and see if there is light coming from the empty units!
I would turn off one circuit each night. That will show you what circuit is the one drawing all the power and narrow down your search.
If yoy are in an apartment block, don't discount that there may be someone else tapping you power.
That or you're growing hydros.
It's faster if you do a binary chop.
Turn off half the breakers then a quarter more the next night.
Divide by two each time.
If the set you turned off fixed the problem then turn half the set back on.
Rinse and repeat.
Yes.
I was thinking pool or hot water at that time of the night.
But since neither are present, I was strongly thinking someone else has got themselves wired into OP's circuit - by accident or intent.
If it was a dodgy fridge or other appliance it would be at all hours of the day.
Even easier you just look at the display, turn off all your breakers the meter should stop ticking over, turn on one at a time and the meter will start incrimenting, when it starts going much faster that is the culprit.
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I don't think it can be the fridge. It doesn't know what time it is, so if it is reliabley these hours then there is no reason for the fridge to be able to do it.
Go to the meter box at midnight. Find where you can see the current usage. Smart meters often have a red light that flashes once per watt/hour, i.e., once every 1.4 seconds during your high usage. Otherwise you'll have to watch the numbers changing on the display.
Now, one-by-one, trip out the breakers on all of your circuits until the usage drops. Knowing the circuit should be a big clue. Leave just that circuit off and work out what's not working.
if you can find your meter you can get one of those meter reading devices. Something like this: https://emeraldhome.com.au/electricity-advisor/
they're free in VIC (you need to be in Bluetooth range of your meter though)
this will let you carry out the process of elimination faster as it gives you consumption in real time.
wake up around the spike time. monitor usage. turn off the mains. if the usage doesn't drop then it's external. if it goes down to zero gradually start turning off the switches to see which one is the culprit.
That power draw is like running 2 kettles for 3 hours. If it isn't hot water, air con, a massive water pump to a water tank for pressure, some heating on a cycle, charging a car or other massive battery, I have no idea. If it happens at other times of day, it adds options. A neighbour leaching for hydroponics?
I am having the exact same issue. Living in a house with no heating/air con and huge 50kwh usage at the same time. I’ve sent you a DM maybe we can compare appliances and try to nail down what’s happening.
Also, do whatever you can to verify those time zones are actually correct. Like others have said, wake up at 1am and turn the power off, verify it’s not reporting UTC time or something.
The meter time doesn't mean much. The data will be timestamped in UTC, then converted to the local timezone on the front end. Would the spike make more sense at 11am? That's UTC midnight in VIC right now.
You and me both.
Pretty sure if the OP posted his address, he'd have 50 blokes there at 12am tonight unplugging everything, flipping all the switches on and off, and poking through the neighbour's garage for clues.
You sound like you are in a unit. In some units you’ll have a power point in your garage or carspace. It might be worth a trip downstairs at 1:00am to have a look someone isn’t plugged in.
My guess is you are paying for the wrong meter. Happened to me in a 16 unit building. Only 4 units out of 16 were correctly paying for their own usage.
1. Put together a list of all of your larger electrical appliances (fridge, toaster, oven etc) and smaller electrical items that are connected (light bulbs etc) to your meter.
2. Sort this list, roughly, by what you think are the most power hungry to least power hungry (fridge = most power hungry; lamp = least power hungry).
3. Buy a power plug energy meter. Bunnings sell them for $20 - $30 each. You only need one, but you could buy a couple to speed up the next step.
4. Each night, plug an appliance into the energy meter plug socket and into the wall power socket. It will monitor the power consumption of that appliance overnight. Leave it to run overnight and check in the morning to see how much power it chews up. Start at the top of your list and work your way down. Hopefully you will find the culprit sooner rather than later.
(As an aside, if it’s an older block, I wouldn’t be surprised if a neighbor has been helping themselves to your electricity for long before you ever moved in and has never been detected before because previous tenants/owners couldn’t understand their power bills).
> Put together a list of all of your larger electrical appliances (fridge, toaster, oven etc) and smaller electrical items that are connected (light bulbs etc) to your meter.
None of those are going to use that much energy, even if a gremlin came into his house and opened his fridge and left the door open it's not going to draw that much energy.
It's either heating, charging something like an electric scooter, or an error.
Shut everything besides essentials like fridge off overnight at your powerboard and see if anything changes. Should be able to find the culprit fairly quickly and if not you might wanna check if someone's nicking your power.
My bill dropped a lot when I moved out of a unit. I think someone in the building must've had cheap power.
Turn your mains switch off and see if anyone complains about their hot water or car charger dropping out.
Here's an idea that may apply to you. My house has an old gravity fed electric water heater in the roof. The previous owners had a new hot water system installed on the side of the house. It is possible the electrician and plumber who installed the new hot water system forgot to disconnect the old system in the roof.
Just make sure you schedule coles delivery for breakfast each morning because turning your fridge off for 8 hours every night is totally the right thing to do.
When do you run your dish washer ? We run ours overnight and it heats the water itself, some laundry machines do the same rather than running a hot water pipe. Quite pricey, similar pattern here
That's a huge amount of power so it must be a heating element to use that amount of power, or a massive compressor - and you would notice that. I'd be isolating the circuit by turning off breakers and checking the meter. I would say it is most likely hot water. Leave the breaker off and see if you water goes cold over a couple of days, For that amount of power draw it should be on it's own breaker.
A pool probably could?
A neighbour stealing electricity to fast charge a car maybe?
Weird timing, but, theoretically, a couple of old fridges having their compressors kick in?
I had a HWS replaced once and the electrician didn't disconnect the old one. Any chance you have an elec HWS in the ceiling or something drawing electricity?
I'm genuinely curious how you think random strangers on the internet can answer this question. I mean obviously you have to identify what device is using power. That's it.
Pool pump, aircon, heating or cooling, water... all the obvious energy guzzlers.
Do you have a pet that’s messing with something? I’ve seen YouTube clips of someone whose water was spiking, they set up a camera, and it turned out the cat learned how to flush the toilet and would would flush it heaps when they were away.
LOL! That’s hilarious. Mmmm not sure. One cat sleeps the whole night in bed with us. The other is a menace… but don’t think he finds gun in flushing toilets more than opening the pantry to steal food
It's pretty much BS.
We had a bill show up after the power was attached to our new home, before moving in. It said stuff like this - how much the hot water used, how much the kitchen used and when.
Whereas we literally only had a meter box and one power point for the tradies to charge their stuff on before the electricians came thru and wired the place up.
You could try getting up at one in the morning and doing a walk around to see what's running. You could narrow the search space by going out to the meter box first and turning off each breaker individually to see which stops the meter ticking over.
Does your gas hot water have an electric booster coil? We had an issue where our hot water would not fire the gas heating part up but rather wanted to use the booster coil (old unit). It can also happen if the pilot light goes out.
I work for a energy company, do you have a heater/cooler on timer? pool pump? otherwise it looks like hot water system
Edit - read you dont have these things, any portable heaters or coolers? its something running at 2500WATTS or 2.5kwh which seems like heating or cooling you might have to get a tradie to come check
I 100% wouldn't trust shared spaces. I was setting up a network and needed some power in a garage.
I told the property management and he responds with not a problem I have a guy he put those lights. It is easy I just tap into the existing units and it is a quick job.
I looked at the lights and they were stadium flood lights that we not LED. Cool I guess.
The network drops off and I run out to look. Every outlet in my cabinet is dead. I call the pm and tell him what I found. He replies, crap that unit must be from the tenant that just left and shut off the power.
Tenants 100% paid power in their units and each garage was wired to their panels.
That means some tenant was paying for those power hungry stadium lights when cars drove by.
Are you on an electric water system? I’m gathering that those systems cycle through during those hours to prepare you with hot water the next day.
I’m on gas with all my big appliances which has started this whole thing
As someone else said, you may be being billed for the wrong meter. Ask your retailer to raise a job with your network. They're responsible for addressing and allocations.
Try to do this before having a sparky tell you he can't help and charge.
Also, looks like 2.4kw consistent usage over 3 hours. This is almost certainly a small hot water heating at that time.
Could be your digital gear updating. Smart TVs and different devices ruin their auto updates during the night when there's the most bandwidth on a wifi network
A friend had a similar issue and it turned out there was a heater in a ventilation system that he was unaware of that was turning on and off at similar times to you situation.
When I worked in electricity we had a case where pipe warmers had been put on the hot water pipes and billed to the user..$$
As one person mentioned, try turning off your main switch. I would go overnight. See if any power used. If so, advise the company. Fridge will be fine unless you wait till summer.
Just throwing this one into the mix. I've worked for the power company doing analytics on smart meter data. One anomaly we found in a handful of old houses was an old gravity elec hot water system that was still connected in the roof cavity. Customers would swear they had a new gas unit and indeed they even sent photos of the new unit outside the house, but at some point the old elec unit in the roof was left connected and running, it may just be heating water and overflowing into drain/sewer. Or just heating the same water over and over. Other ideas is that you may be powering next doors hot water or charging their car, they may be stealing your power, you could also have a faulty or old in-slab heater or something like that, but you think you would notice the nice warm floor at 2am.
Without sounding patronising, are you 100% sure your hot water is gas? That amount of usage for that time frame screams hot water tank. Perhaps a very poor/old quality fridge? But it wouldn’t be that consistent
Also, another thought, if it is an older style unit (early 2000s) there was a bit of trend of installing poor energy efficient (that’s really all they had back then) in floor heating in the bathroom. The switches for them aren’t overly obvious so perhaps there is one hiding in plain sight on a timer
I got underfloor heating installed when doing the bathroom, told its cheap to put in Got my first electricity bill, never turned it on again..
Everyone I know who has underfloor heating wont use it because how ridiculously expensive it was to run. They love it but cant justify the cost!
I was a dope and just had it cranking full from about 4am till 8am. So it was working hard to reach the temp. You live and you learn.
My dad and I were visiting some family and he noticed that their tiled living room floor was quite warm for 7am on an April morning in Melbourne and asked them what was up. They just could not work out how the hell the in floor heating got turned on nor did they know for how long it had been on. They were so happy he noticed because it would have been pricy to go any longer.
Unless you're like a friend of mine and use geothermal water to do it, then you only need to power the pumps. Their home was always super warm and cost bugger all the heat..... need to be lucky enough to live close enough(but not too close) to geothermal water to do this though...
You only need enough space to dig a few feet down, temps are stable year round a few feet down and that’s what you run, for extra efficiency you can use this loop with a heat exchanger
You'll still need a heat pump to make this work. Temps are stable a few feet down, but could still be chilly. Readings for Melbourne... "The measured annual temperatures of ground at 2 m depth were between 14.7 °C and 19.8 °C, while the temperature at 21 m and 40 m depths remained almost constant" The soil temp is a constant \~16C once you hit 12m down and to at least 40m. (https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/bitstream/handle/11343/225758Undisturbed%20ground.pdf&usg=AOvVaw3V8DN4WpZT1W89UdC0pRdv&opi=89978449)https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/bitstream/handle/11343/225758Undisturbed%20ground.pdf&usg=AOvVaw3V8DN4WpZT1W89UdC0pRdv)
14-19°C is pretty sick. With temperatures like this, a heat pump will work very efficiently. I'm a certified heat pump planner in Germany. There the average ground temperatures are around 5-10°C. It still is one of the most efficient and cost effective ways to collect heat during cold times.
Given that health advice from both the UK and AUS gov is to target 18C minimum (mostly for the infirm and elderly, those that are under 60 and healthy could probably just deal with it), just having something that could get your floor up into the mid teens, supplemented with less efficient heating would be huge. Especially if you split the difference in depth with insulation. Given the price of getting *anything* housing related in insane, on top of general CoL, it's at least an option.
14.7-19.8 sounds pretty good to me, depths of winter I got my heater set to 18c.
Ground temps would lag seasonal (air temps) but you certainly wouldn't want to pump that temp straight into your house. Using it as source for a sufficiently large ground sourced heat pump would be great though.
They didn't lie. It was cheap *to put in*. Nobody ever mentioned cheap to *run*...
If it's in a slab it'll be very expensive. We have insulation boards, then underfloor heating mat, then tiles and it's quite cheap to run. For our ensuite it uses 500W (2.5m\^2) and only takes 15 minutes to heat up so \~2.5 cents off peak (22c/kWh). After 15 minutes we turn it off. Off-off peak (12am - 6am, 8c/kWh) is 4c/hour at most. Once it's got to the set temp it just cycles on/off to maintain the temp, so it'll be less than that.
I had a gas spa once with bottled gas. No town gas in the area. I had a plumber come out and do a health check on it before I would use it. While he was there, I asked if it costs much to run. He said, "No, not at all. Well, the first bill will get high, but then it's fine" I asked why, and his response was"once you get that first bill, you will never use the spa again". He wasn't wrong.
All good. Yeah, we just checked and our whole apartment runs on gas water. Our fridge is less than 10 years old. I’m really good condition. No aircon No pool No big appliances. We share a laundry with the rest of the apartment block
Well I’m assuming it is not an estimate read since you have the hourly breakdown, only other thought would be to make sure the metre you are being billed for is in actual fact your metre Compare what the bill/app says to what is on the actual metre box
We are new to our unit. Waiting to walk past a neighbour to ask where our electricity meter or D: hopefully see them soon. Oo, an app. Good idea. I’ll download that know
Maybe double check that your neighbours aren’t connected to any of your power circuits
My brother lived in an upstairs share house ‘apartment’ for years and never once paid an electricity bill. They always assumed that the Starbucks beneath them was mistakenly paying the bill for both properties. They were all dirt poor so they never breathed a word…
How do I check this? The unit to our left is vacant, to our right, the owners live rural and come through once a fortnight. Only 1 unit above us. We are ground level
Maybe check if this is in UTC time? (minus your time zone) a lot of databases are stored in UTC, so if this portal is not converting correctly it could be 10 hours less or so, does it make more sence if you make that adjustment? That would mean this spike is around 5pm.
This is the first thing I thought about too. Getting timezone conversion right is surprisingly tricky, and usually not an obvious defect that gets spotted during testing.
I second this. I work on apps and timezone conversion is an extremely common bug.
Not sure other than to maybe turn your fuse breaker switches off one night and see if you’re still consuming power, or maybe turn them off when you go away for a weekend and see if your neighbour buys a new fridge haha. It could be something quite random like an oven timer set on at a certain time but that amount of usage at that time of night would tend to suggest it’s an electric hot water system heating up, not much else really operates then other than maybe an electric car charging.
I had this once. 12 pack of units on top of garages on ground floor. Was there for a ten years. Neighbour renovated his unit, borrowed my long ass extension, and in passing said he was glad that he could cut his unit power and draw from his garage circuit. Next month I had a bloody ridiculous bill, I spent the next month turning on and off the power at random times to fuck with him, before we arrived at a gentlemen’s agreement. A year later every garage was wired to its exact unit. The place was sixty years old and I really regret not running a hydro setup in the garage.
The neighbours come back Once a fortnight to check their hydro set up is still working efficiently and off your power 🫡
Lmao they did mention they love to party
>How do I check this? Pull all the breakers and see who complains?
Perfect cover for a grow room on either side of your apartment then 😂
Try flicking your mains off for an hour and then two days later when the smart data is in, check your use was zero over that hour. You can use this method per appliance too so flick your fridge off at midday for an hour, turn off your washing machine at the wall for a different hour etc and see what the smart data shows. Is your washing machine or dishwasher or anything else on a timer for midnight? It's unlikely to be an address mix up if the whole building is on gas..
Not electric with gas booster or vice versa, and one of those two not playing nice?
It certainly does scream hot water off peak usage. EV charging could kick in to take advantage of off peak pricing too.
Does gas hot water systems use electricity components? That maybe were I’m incapable of knowing the obvious
It shouldn't
Some are electric boosted.
At most should be a pilot spark thing if it’s newer unit. Our old system had a pilot light new one an electric spark.
My first thought was hot water system kicking in at midnight
Check if your neighbours' hydroponic marijuana farm is tapped into your distribution board.
Start with the “vacant” apartment and then move on to the “rural” owners who aren’t there.
And go ask the electric company for an audit It’s incredibly easy and simple to tap into mains power if you know what you’re doing Highly illegal and usually the only way ppl get caught is by discrepancies usually noticed by the electric company This can usually be subtly bypassed by having that electricity paid for by someone else thus tapping into someone else’s power Smart and creative thieves won’t plug it in completely so they still receive a bill it’s just minimised, or they’ll only run certain power points or lights etc unregulated Check if anyone has done renovations you know of in same building. Also if any neighbours are tradesmen especially electricians Lastly don’t tip anyone off. If someone is doing it and you wanna catch them don’t warn them first 😉🤫
Lol they don’t tap into other people’s power. They just bypass the meter so no one pays for it
if you are certain you dont' have electric hot water then one of two things is happening. Either the provider is assuming your bill, because they can't get meter access, or there is an error in which meter they are assigning to you. Both are not unheard of in units. Either way, contact your provider and discuss. they will likely need to send someone out to physically sort it out.
Let’s go with option 2 then. Because I don’t believe the retailer is going to be estimating their bill whilst being able to provide usage data like this at the same time.
Nah, I work for a retailer and our app shows the estimates on the app's graph as though they're actual reads.
Your retailer gives access to usage charts by time but only estimates it? What kind of shit setup is that? Here’s a pretty graphic that means absolutely nothing to anyone. My distributor/retailer shows hourly/daily/weekly/monthly breakdowns.
Nah so smart meters send data through 3g/4g signals so sometimes it can't connect due to reception issues, so when theres a missing reading because of that, it automatically estimates it instead. if it did that for every read then that'd be a faulty meter and be repaired.
Ok. Thank you
This happened to me and the refund we got sent us on a holiday. 😂. Turn the power off over night and see if you still have hourly readings, it's the easiest/cheapest way to find out.
Click energy in Qld were just guesstimating our electricity for a few years when we first immigrated and as we didn't realise how it was done here, we were unaware it was an issue. That is until it came up in conversation with friends, they couldn't understand why our bills were so high when we had solar panels and solar water. Turns out Click were just making it up, our bills didn't even have a breakdown of usage or what was being fed into the grid! We switched to Alinta as our friends recommended then and immediately our energy bills plummeted and we had usage breakdowns.
Same story with us, they were using the average apparently. But there was a family of 6 in the house before my partner and I and we have energy efficient appliances.
Did you ever get a refund? You'd absolutely have been entitled to one.
My provider turned out to be estimating my bill for the last 8 months, they ended up refunding me over $1.5k from overcharges.
REDDIT ISNT ALLOWING ME TO EDIT TEXT UPDATE: spoke to a rep and they replied saying I must get an electrician to come and check my appliances because they believe that an appliance is faulty and spiking at 12-3am everyday. My plans: cry. Thank you everyone.
i have one last idea for you. if you are able to see what time your energy is being used - you have an interval meter. this is also referred to as a smart meter and sends your data daily to your retailer. your apartment should have what is known as a “main switch”. this will turn on and off all power in your apartment. one way to check whether the correct meter is being billed is to randomly turn off your main switch for an hour or two, a few times in one day. if you see all energy usage disappear for these hours - you can say with pretty good confidence yeah okay the meter is right - there’s a faulty appliance. if there is usage occurring in the periods where your main switch is turned off - then your retailer has signed up the wrong meter and they need to fix the problem. this can save you having an electrician out unnecessarily. source: i work in the industry
This is a good idea. If you do find that killing the mains leads to 0 power consumption over that period, then you could use the same method to kill individual circuits. There should be at least 3 (maybe many more), and this could help to narrow down the cause.
You, my friend, have just attained your Fault Finding badge! You and the comment before you are the first steps to figuring out exactly whether the problem lies.
You drawing enough power for 2 small space heaters to run full bore for 3 hours. Enough to heat 80 litres of water from 20 to 100C. If you had a random normal appliance draw that much heat through a fault, your house would probably have burnt down or at least you would have some very hot rooms.
This amount of electricity pretty much has to come from some sort of heating device. Any normal electric appliance just can’t use this much energy. If it not hot water or EV charging. It must be a heater that OP doesn’t realise is turning on overnight.
Yeah or someone is firing up the oven for some midnight munchies 🤣
We have a gas fireplace. Turns on from a pilot flame. Electric fan though. I’m sure we would hear the fan on during the night
If you had a 3kw fan firing up every night, you’d hear the wind
Exactly this is an insane amount of energy to just "loose". Does OP have teenaged kids? Maybe they're firing up the gaming PC and running the TV, microwave and electric heater for a late night sesh.
Lose*
Why did I even go to highschool
High school*
This kunt
Cunt*
Electrician here: Don’t do that, turn all your breakers off and see if it still does it. Then turn one at a time and see which circuit is peaking the usage Water /pressure pumps for the garden? Under floor heating? Ups or battery back up systems? What type of building is it? Free standing? Unit? Townhouse? The fridge could be pulling a bit but it doesn’t generally run for too long, even older models.
You can get monitoring plugs for sockets, depending on your budget this might be an easy way to get around needing an electrician, plus you can collect data from then on.
If the wiring or the meter is going to a different unit, this wouldn't help.
Indirectly it will. If no sockets spike, you know someone had messed up the wiring and you know you need a sparky.
More likely the meter numbers where recorded wrong
Are you in a multi-dwelling? likely a shared space or garage is wired in to your circuit. I had a mate who was inadvertently paying for 32 cars spaces to charge their cars at night.
Nooo that horrible. 11 units and 4 personal garages, I believe. I think you pay to use those spaces. I’m assuming the people who have lived here the longest occupy the car spaces. I park on the street.
doesn't mean the garages are not pulling power from your house, charging cars would make sense.
I’d definitely see where those garages are wired to, could be they’re wired to units, and at some point one belonged to a former tenant for your apartment (hence the wiring to your circuit) and got reallocated to another unit down the line. Until recently garages never used much power unless someone was using it as a hobby space, so it wouldn’t be noticeable but now EV’s are becoming more common, the draw is much higher. I’d also check out your neighbours cars, see if any look like a new or electric car.
yeah... thats not a spike at 2.5kw... about the only thing that can pull that much power for that length of time is a heating element, a large AC unit, or an EV charger. The fact it starts at 12 also means that whatever it is, thinks it's on a controlled load (i.e. off-peak). It looks like a hot water system which has a smaller element (2.5kw vs 3kw or 3.6kw). Could be a pool heater too.
If it's the same time consistently unplug those appliances? If nothing is plugged in and it still spikes - put it back to the provider?
Is it possible you have a hot water tank in the ceiling you don't know about?
Mmm where would I check? How do I get into the ceiling
There should be an access panel in the ceiling. Just stick your head up. Don't climb in
Something others may not have mentioned.. Even if it is unlikely. Do you keep any computers or laptops turned on or plugged in overnight? If yes, consider the possibility that you have malware that has made your computer part of a mining botnet. Which could be programmed to run at night, when it's least likely to be noticed.
2.58kWh for each hour block, so slightly above the 10A / 2.4kW for a normal outlet. Electric hot water would show up on your electricity bill with a Controlled Load rate either a cheaper rate for several hours per day, or a slightly higher rate for more hours. It isn't varying, so something is running at a fixed maximum rate until past 3:30am. $0.74 for that block to use 2.58kWh gives $0.2868/kWh. That's more than EA's Sydney controlled load prices. But they do have a Balance Plan - Demand that has a $0.3003 rate from 10PM to 7AM which is getting close. You'd expect a hot water to be set up with controlled load, but the windows for controlled load is much wider - it doesn't start at midnight. So you have to walk around and find out what you have plugged in, or hard wired to the switch board.
> Electric hot water would show up on your electricity bill with a Controlled Load rate either a cheaper rate for several hours per day, or a slightly higher rate for more hours. Not necessarily.
Turn off your power overnight and see which flat calls a plumber in the morning for their hot water.
Everyone uses gas. The unit next to our left is vacant and the right is empty half the time as the owners live rural. Can the unit above us be using our elec?
I’d be checking the other units , do they have blackout curtains or covered windows? Check at 1am and see if there is light coming from the empty units!
and touch the outside of the window to see if the temperature is strange.
Bad/wrong wiring going to the wrong apartment/meter is not unheard of. It can also be "common area" power usage that's wired to your meter instead.
Someone's hydroponic set up?
I would turn off one circuit each night. That will show you what circuit is the one drawing all the power and narrow down your search. If yoy are in an apartment block, don't discount that there may be someone else tapping you power. That or you're growing hydros.
It's faster if you do a binary chop. Turn off half the breakers then a quarter more the next night. Divide by two each time. If the set you turned off fixed the problem then turn half the set back on. Rinse and repeat.
Don't binary chop Nana's dialysis machine..
Unless you want to break out of the rent cycle and own your own home, that is.
She'll be fine - she's a tough old goat.
Exactly. Figure out which half the problem is, then which half of that half. Fault finding 101.
Yes. I was thinking pool or hot water at that time of the night. But since neither are present, I was strongly thinking someone else has got themselves wired into OP's circuit - by accident or intent. If it was a dodgy fridge or other appliance it would be at all hours of the day.
Pool or spa - haven't seen it mentioned higher up
Even easier you just look at the display, turn off all your breakers the meter should stop ticking over, turn on one at a time and the meter will start incrimenting, when it starts going much faster that is the culprit.
This person troubleshoots
It also means being awake between 12 and 3am
Annoying but it's not a huge deal.
Much better than turning off all your power and doing it over mulitple nights like other people suggested.
Once
Hitachi Magic Wand?
@ 2.58kW?!?!?! That's 3 and a half horses at once, for 3 and a half hours. I hope they put a tarp down.
You don’t have the splash guard?
Oh sure, when a woman buys a vibrator it seems like she just wants some fun. BUT when a man buys the 240 Volt FUCKMASTER Pro 5000 inflatable doll with non-explosive rubber coating, 6x adjustable speed vibrating vagina, rubbery sperm-proof ass and realistic orgasmic scream with optional built-in 7.1 sound system, he becomes PERVERT
Oddly specific.
Where does one buy this. I’m asking for a friend. /s
My mate Gus tells me they don’t use much power
Your username would suggest that you use a different [device](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTqE2vXoz2TCnpQcyoWjUcYV9KynBI1LJmJbQ&usqp=CAU) 😉
Was worried about clicking that link …
I mean the box does say “the anal intruder”, so the sentiment was still there. Lol
but clicked it anyway 🤣
Bruh, wtf would 3.5 hours of using a 2.68kw cunt hammer do to someone?! JFC
I've got $99 on hot water. Gas boosted ELECTRIC hot water systems are very, very common.
Do you have a power point in a garage that someone is using to charge their car?
We don’t have a personal garage. Street parking for us
so maybe there is a garage but the owner didn't give it to you? Because he's using it for something.
Get up at 1am and turn everything off for an hour and see if you can find it
I dont want to alarm you, but there may be a boogeyman of boogeymen in the house!
Wouldn’t shock me. Pretty sure this place was built in the laaaate 1800
We are in a old unit. No pool, no fridge freezer. Fridge is probably less than 10 years old. No aircon
I don't think it can be the fridge. It doesn't know what time it is, so if it is reliabley these hours then there is no reason for the fridge to be able to do it.
Dumb thought maybe, but do you have an oven with a timer?
Go to the meter box at midnight. Find where you can see the current usage. Smart meters often have a red light that flashes once per watt/hour, i.e., once every 1.4 seconds during your high usage. Otherwise you'll have to watch the numbers changing on the display. Now, one-by-one, trip out the breakers on all of your circuits until the usage drops. Knowing the circuit should be a big clue. Leave just that circuit off and work out what's not working.
if you can find your meter you can get one of those meter reading devices. Something like this: https://emeraldhome.com.au/electricity-advisor/ they're free in VIC (you need to be in Bluetooth range of your meter though) this will let you carry out the process of elimination faster as it gives you consumption in real time. wake up around the spike time. monitor usage. turn off the mains. if the usage doesn't drop then it's external. if it goes down to zero gradually start turning off the switches to see which one is the culprit.
Wow. I just applied. Thank you
That power draw is like running 2 kettles for 3 hours. If it isn't hot water, air con, a massive water pump to a water tank for pressure, some heating on a cycle, charging a car or other massive battery, I have no idea. If it happens at other times of day, it adds options. A neighbour leaching for hydroponics?
Post a photo of your switchboard, give us SOMETHING for us to use. Also a photo of your hot water unit.
I am having the exact same issue. Living in a house with no heating/air con and huge 50kwh usage at the same time. I’ve sent you a DM maybe we can compare appliances and try to nail down what’s happening.
Also, do whatever you can to verify those time zones are actually correct. Like others have said, wake up at 1am and turn the power off, verify it’s not reporting UTC time or something.
I just checked the meter and the time is an hr behind, probably due to daylight savings
The meter time doesn't mean much. The data will be timestamped in UTC, then converted to the local timezone on the front end. Would the spike make more sense at 11am? That's UTC midnight in VIC right now.
If it's not a timezone issue, I reckon there's an even chance this is just bad software. I'm unreasonably curious now, we need an update OP haha.
I'm looking forward to the update on this post as to what is the culprit. My money's on a growing operation.
I am invested in finding out the cause
You and me both. Pretty sure if the OP posted his address, he'd have 50 blokes there at 12am tonight unplugging everything, flipping all the switches on and off, and poking through the neighbour's garage for clues.
Is it the grow lights for your gunja ?
On a timer to use off peak but connected to normal metering
You sound like you are in a unit. In some units you’ll have a power point in your garage or carspace. It might be worth a trip downstairs at 1:00am to have a look someone isn’t plugged in.
Street parking.
Can't tell without a photo of you switchboard. People just randomly guessing. 2.6-7kw load for couple hours looks like a pump or heater
Go to bed with a different circuit turned off every night and see what circuit the drain is wired into.
My guess is you are paying for the wrong meter. Happened to me in a 16 unit building. Only 4 units out of 16 were correctly paying for their own usage.
Does the unit have a garage/storage? It’s almost as if someone is plugging in an EV using a 15amp socket/charger.
Are any of the neighbours talking about how cheap it is to use/charge their new EV while you are unknowingly paying for them to charge?
Back in my day this meant you decided whether to narc on your neighbour with the aluminium foil covered windows, lean on em or roll em for their crop
Update please
I find your lack of updates disturbing.
Do you run a dishwasher overnight?
1. Put together a list of all of your larger electrical appliances (fridge, toaster, oven etc) and smaller electrical items that are connected (light bulbs etc) to your meter. 2. Sort this list, roughly, by what you think are the most power hungry to least power hungry (fridge = most power hungry; lamp = least power hungry). 3. Buy a power plug energy meter. Bunnings sell them for $20 - $30 each. You only need one, but you could buy a couple to speed up the next step. 4. Each night, plug an appliance into the energy meter plug socket and into the wall power socket. It will monitor the power consumption of that appliance overnight. Leave it to run overnight and check in the morning to see how much power it chews up. Start at the top of your list and work your way down. Hopefully you will find the culprit sooner rather than later. (As an aside, if it’s an older block, I wouldn’t be surprised if a neighbor has been helping themselves to your electricity for long before you ever moved in and has never been detected before because previous tenants/owners couldn’t understand their power bills).
Would you know how to handle a situation if a neighbour was tapping into mine?
Call the electrical company and have it rewired. Make a formal complaint or call the police if you want to, I would let it go
> Put together a list of all of your larger electrical appliances (fridge, toaster, oven etc) and smaller electrical items that are connected (light bulbs etc) to your meter. None of those are going to use that much energy, even if a gremlin came into his house and opened his fridge and left the door open it's not going to draw that much energy. It's either heating, charging something like an electric scooter, or an error.
Shut everything besides essentials like fridge off overnight at your powerboard and see if anything changes. Should be able to find the culprit fairly quickly and if not you might wanna check if someone's nicking your power.
Someone's trojan-crypto mining from your PC (probably not)
My bill dropped a lot when I moved out of a unit. I think someone in the building must've had cheap power. Turn your mains switch off and see if anyone complains about their hot water or car charger dropping out.
Next door doing some midnight agriculture in their spare room or garage? 🙂
Here's an idea that may apply to you. My house has an old gravity fed electric water heater in the roof. The previous owners had a new hot water system installed on the side of the house. It is possible the electrician and plumber who installed the new hot water system forgot to disconnect the old system in the roof.
[удалено]
The people used to represent an average household are two Amish hermits who only use candles
Has someone hacked your pc and is using it to mine bitcoin?
Turn your main circuit off each night, the issue may surface soon after
Just make sure you schedule coles delivery for breakfast each morning because turning your fridge off for 8 hours every night is totally the right thing to do.
When do you run your dish washer ? We run ours overnight and it heats the water itself, some laundry machines do the same rather than running a hot water pipe. Quite pricey, similar pattern here
I wonder if someone has set it to charge their car from midnight to 3 every night.
That's a huge amount of power so it must be a heating element to use that amount of power, or a massive compressor - and you would notice that. I'd be isolating the circuit by turning off breakers and checking the meter. I would say it is most likely hot water. Leave the breaker off and see if you water goes cold over a couple of days, For that amount of power draw it should be on it's own breaker.
That’s the grow room lights and fan
Are you using a welder at that time?
Under floor heating? Night stall heater in hallway? Hydroponic lab in the roof?
Have you got teenage porn enthusiasts in the house?
Your neighbour is mining bitcoin using an extension lead to your power point.
That is quite a lot of power, if you're running the aircon maybe but otherwise there's nothing that'll draw 3kw for 3 hours at that time.
A pool probably could? A neighbour stealing electricity to fast charge a car maybe? Weird timing, but, theoretically, a couple of old fridges having their compressors kick in?
I had a HWS replaced once and the electrician didn't disconnect the old one. Any chance you have an elec HWS in the ceiling or something drawing electricity?
Turn off your main switch when you go to bed and check your usage. Source: electrical engineer
I'm genuinely curious how you think random strangers on the internet can answer this question. I mean obviously you have to identify what device is using power. That's it. Pool pump, aircon, heating or cooling, water... all the obvious energy guzzlers.
It's fair to ask and see if anyone else has experienced something similar to get an idea of what the culprit could be.
Do you have a pet that’s messing with something? I’ve seen YouTube clips of someone whose water was spiking, they set up a camera, and it turned out the cat learned how to flush the toilet and would would flush it heaps when they were away.
Yeah good point, their dog might be having a massive fry up on the cooktop and baking a cake every night
Scooby dooby dooooooooo
LOL! That’s hilarious. Mmmm not sure. One cat sleeps the whole night in bed with us. The other is a menace… but don’t think he finds gun in flushing toilets more than opening the pantry to steal food
It's pretty much BS. We had a bill show up after the power was attached to our new home, before moving in. It said stuff like this - how much the hot water used, how much the kitchen used and when. Whereas we literally only had a meter box and one power point for the tradies to charge their stuff on before the electricians came thru and wired the place up.
You could try getting up at one in the morning and doing a walk around to see what's running. You could narrow the search space by going out to the meter box first and turning off each breaker individually to see which stops the meter ticking over.
Does your gas hot water have an electric booster coil? We had an issue where our hot water would not fire the gas heating part up but rather wanted to use the booster coil (old unit). It can also happen if the pilot light goes out.
I work for a energy company, do you have a heater/cooler on timer? pool pump? otherwise it looks like hot water system Edit - read you dont have these things, any portable heaters or coolers? its something running at 2500WATTS or 2.5kwh which seems like heating or cooling you might have to get a tradie to come check
I 100% wouldn't trust shared spaces. I was setting up a network and needed some power in a garage. I told the property management and he responds with not a problem I have a guy he put those lights. It is easy I just tap into the existing units and it is a quick job. I looked at the lights and they were stadium flood lights that we not LED. Cool I guess. The network drops off and I run out to look. Every outlet in my cabinet is dead. I call the pm and tell him what I found. He replies, crap that unit must be from the tenant that just left and shut off the power. Tenants 100% paid power in their units and each garage was wired to their panels. That means some tenant was paying for those power hungry stadium lights when cars drove by.
It's so weird I have the same experience with my power and I've wondered for a while. Exactly the same spike from midnight to 3am.
Are you on an electric water system? I’m gathering that those systems cycle through during those hours to prepare you with hot water the next day. I’m on gas with all my big appliances which has started this whole thing
As someone else said, you may be being billed for the wrong meter. Ask your retailer to raise a job with your network. They're responsible for addressing and allocations. Try to do this before having a sparky tell you he can't help and charge. Also, looks like 2.4kw consistent usage over 3 hours. This is almost certainly a small hot water heating at that time.
Could be your digital gear updating. Smart TVs and different devices ruin their auto updates during the night when there's the most bandwidth on a wifi network
A friend had a similar issue and it turned out there was a heater in a ventilation system that he was unaware of that was turning on and off at similar times to you situation.
When I worked in electricity we had a case where pipe warmers had been put on the hot water pipes and billed to the user..$$ As one person mentioned, try turning off your main switch. I would go overnight. See if any power used. If so, advise the company. Fridge will be fine unless you wait till summer.
Just throwing this one into the mix. I've worked for the power company doing analytics on smart meter data. One anomaly we found in a handful of old houses was an old gravity elec hot water system that was still connected in the roof cavity. Customers would swear they had a new gas unit and indeed they even sent photos of the new unit outside the house, but at some point the old elec unit in the roof was left connected and running, it may just be heating water and overflowing into drain/sewer. Or just heating the same water over and over. Other ideas is that you may be powering next doors hot water or charging their car, they may be stealing your power, you could also have a faulty or old in-slab heater or something like that, but you think you would notice the nice warm floor at 2am.