Where does the energy go in a house?

On this page

1. The whole house in one picture
2. Everything hangs on how the house is heated
3. The 20 000 kWh myth
4. Hot water, where the sources disagree
5. The thing that is on around the clock
6. How to get your own figures
7. Check yourself

The whole house in one picture

In the first module the house was a bucket with holes in it. Now we put numbers on the bucket, and it fits in a single picture.

This is what an average Swedish house looked like during 2024, according to Energimyndigheten's official statistics. It is an average across two million houses. Your own may sit a long way from it — but the shape is the right place to start.

One year in an average Swedish house, share of everything

• Heating and hot water14 200 kWh · 72 %

• Household electricity — everything else5 654 kWh · 28 %

Energimyndigheten, Energistatistik för småhus, reference year 2024, published 10 June 2025. The bars are shares of the house's whole year.

The two figures are looked up. The percentages are calculated, and you can do it yourself:

14 200 + 5 654 = 19 854 kWh
14 200 ÷ 19 854 = 0,715 → 72 %

Energimyndigheten also publishes its own total: 40 299 GWh spread over 2 040 800 houses, which is 19 747 kWh per house. That is a hundred-odd kilowatt-hours away from our addition — half a per cent, and the gap comes from rounding inside the published statistics. We print it rather than quietly picking one.

Read the bar correctly, because the module's first trap is right here. The figures are purchased energy — what the house paid for. They are not the heat the house received.

Everything hangs on how the house is heated

The average of 90 kWh per square metre — 90.5 in the table that counts per house — hides an enormous spread. The same statistics split the houses by heating method, and then the figures fall apart:

Three times over between the lowest row and the highest. It tempts an easy conclusion: the ground-source house is the best, the wood-burning house the worst. That conclusion is wrong, and understanding why is this whole module.

Why the heat-pump row is so low. A heat pump does not make heat. It moves heat that is already in the bedrock or the soil, into the house. The electricity you buy drives the move, not the heating. So the house may need exactly as much heat as its neighbour — it simply buys a smaller part of it.

Roughly how much heat does 49 kWh/m² become?

A heat pump's seasonal factor says how many kilowatt-hours of heat each purchased kilowatt-hour becomes. Our own engine uses 3.0. The cited band for ground source is 3.5 to 5.0, and for air-to-water 2.5 to 3.5.

49 × 3,5 = 171
49 × 5,0 = 245 kWh/m²

That only holds if all of it went through the pump. An immersion heater helping out on cold days has a factor of 1. And Sweden publishes no statistics on how much heat the houses need, only on what they bought. So the figures above are calculated, not measured.

Why the district-heating row is so high. The district-heating meter sits where the heat enters the house, and it counts the heat itself — every kilowatt-hour that keeps the rooms warm. The electric rows count electricity. The heat-pump row counts only the part that was bought. So 119 does not mean the house is worse. It means the meter is counting something more complete.

The 20 000 kWh myth

Open any comparison site and you meet the same number: a normal villa uses 20 000 kWh a year. It appears in price comparisons, in quotes and in newspaper articles. It is not an average. It is a standard test customer — an invented customer used to work out price statistics, so that different contracts can be compared on the same basis.

Measured reality sits lower. Here are the two sides next to each other:

The difference is not academic. A saving worked out on 20 000 kWh instead of your measured 15 000 comes out a third too large, before anyone has even discussed equipment or price:

20 000 ÷ 15 000 = 1,33 → +33 %

That is why the measure calculator asks how much energy your own house buys, instead of calculating on a standard villa. And it is why it is worth a quarter of an hour to fetch your real figures — which we come to at the foot of this page.

Hot water, where the sources disagree

The big bar at the top was called heating and hot water, and the two are lumped together for a dull reason: most houses do not meter them separately. But they behave quite differently. Heating disappears in summer. Hot water does not — it is about as large in July as in January.

So how large is the hot water? Here the sources part ways, and we are not going to choose for you.

• The sector convention is that hot water is about 20 per cent of a house's total energy use — roughly 3 000 to 4 000 kWh a year. It is a planning convention, not a measurement.
• Energimyndigheten's own measurements in real households found less: about 2 700 kWh a year for heating water in a house. That is a measurement, in a limited number of households.

So the band is 2 700 to 4 000 kWh a year, and the upper half is a convention while the lower half is measured. Work with the band until you have weighed your own house.

To make that less abstract: 2 700 kWh over a year is about 7.4 kWh a day. In module 01 we worked out that a shower costs roughly 418 watt-hours a minute. So the household's entire hot water comes to just under twenty shower-minutes a day — showering, washing up, hand washing and everything else together.

2 700 ÷ 365 = 7,4 kWh a day
7 400 ÷ 418 = 17,7 minutes

The thing that is on around the clock

Now comes the module's most useful trick, and it costs nothing to try tonight.

A year has 8 760 hours. So anything running all the time gets multiplied by 8 760, and that makes even small power figures heavy:

0,150 kW × 8 760 = 1 314 kWh
0,300 kW × 8 760 = 2 628 kWh

That is the base load: the house when nobody is doing anything. Our own engine works with a band of 150 W as a low level and 300 W as typical. The figures are deliberately round — they are not a measurement of your house but a common starting point in Swedish energy advice, where a fridge or a freezer alone draws around 40 to 80 W.

Now set 2 628 kWh next to the smaller bar in the first figure. Household electricity in an average house was 5 654 kWh. So a 300 W base load is nearly half that bar — consumed by things nobody has touched.

2 628 ÷ 5 654 = 0,46 → 46 %
5 654 ÷ 8 760 = 0,645 kW = 645 W

The second line is the same thing from the other direction: the house draws an average of 645 W of household electricity, around the clock, all year. If the floor sits at 300 W, then about half the average draw is something that never switches off.

A day in the house, and the floor beneath it

Here is how to find your own base load. Look at the house's consumption at three in the morning, on a night when nobody is showering, doing laundry or charging a car. The whole house is asleep. Whatever still shows on the meter is the floor, and you pay for that floor every hour of the year. If it is 0.3 kWh an hour it costs 2 628 kWh a year. If it is 0.1 kWh an hour it costs 876.

Then the detective work starts. Walk through the house at that hour and ask what is genuinely running: the freezer in the garage, a circulation pump nobody switched off after last winter, an underfloor heating loop in a bathroom, a heating cable in a gutter, the ventilation, an old computer. A ten-year-old freezer draws 400 to 500 kWh a year where a new one draws about 250. A combined fridge-freezer sits around 440.

How to get your own figures

Everything above is averages. Your own house has real figures, hour by hour, and you have the right to take them home.

They sit with your grid company, not with your electricity retailer. The grid company owns the meter on your wall and is the party that measures. Log in to their Mina sidor and look for consumption or metering values. There you can normally download a file of monthly, hourly or quarter-hourly values.

This is not a favour they are doing you. Since 5 January 2025 an EU regulation has required the grid company to let you download your own metering values easily and securely, in a usable format. You may also pass them on to someone else, and see a log of who has fetched them.

One more thing has changed, and it shows up in the file: Swedish metering has moved to quarter-hourly values. Since 1 November 2023 you can require quarter-hourly metering, and if your meter cannot do it the grid company must replace it within 40 days. From delivery day 1 October 2025 the spot price itself has been traded in quarters across Europe, Sweden included. So the price signal became four times sharper.

Three dates that are often muddled

• 22 May 2023. eSett, which does balance settlement for the Nordics, moved to quarter-hourly resolution in its calculations.
• 1 November 2023. The measurement regulation changed: metering values underlying balance settlement must be reported in quarters. From this date a household can require quarter-hourly metering.
• 30 September 2025. The trading day when the day-ahead market moved to quarters, for delivery from 1 October. That is the one households notice as quarter pricing.

Once you have the file you are done with averages. You can read your base load off the night, see how much of the year is heat and how much is everything else, and calculate on your own house instead of somebody else's. You can then put your own annual figure into the measure calculator, and our guides walk through the measures that usually turn up once you have looked.

One piece of honesty as well: our own engine calculates in whole hours, while Sweden now measures in quarters. Hourly matching systematically flatters how much of its own electricity a house is deemed to use itself, and with it how much a battery appears to be worth. So we always state which resolution such a figure came out of.

Check yourself