Direct answer
"Fridge only" almost never explains 11–17 kWh/day in a vacant Puerto Morelos house. Hidden loads, CFE tariff slip, or solar/CT mis-wiring are the usual culprits — bring a licensed technician, not a Facebook contractor.
Residual bills while away usually mean hidden loads — not only the refrigerator. Daily totals in roughly the mid‑teens kWh strongly suggest pumps, inverter/idle draw, thermal loads, cooling equipment, mis-labeled metering, or the whole‑home monitor measuring more than “fridge-only.” Bring a licensed solar + electrical technician to correlate your monitoring app against CFE delivery, clamps/CT wiring, inverter settings, breakers left on, and pool/well equipment.
Full details
A refrigerator running 24/7 in the Riviera Maya climate typically pulls 1.5–3 kWh/day depending on age, door seals, and ambient room temperature. So when you see 11, 14, 17 kWh/day on a vacant home, something else is doing 8–14 kWh/day of work — and that something is almost never visible from the road.
The most common hidden loads we find on vacant Puerto Morelos homes, ranked by frequency:
- Pool, hot tub, or palapa-area pumps that owners forgot are still on a timer.
- Septic pumps, cistern pumps, or aerator pumps that cycle 24/7 on biofilter systems.
- Inverter idle / standby draw (typically 30–80W = ~0.7–1.9 kWh/day even when "producing nothing").
- Phantom loads from modems, smart-home hubs, alarm panels, DVRs/cameras, mini-splits in "vacation" mode (which is rarely true standby).
- CT (current transformer) clamp installed on the wrong leg of a split-phase service, double-counting one circuit.
- CFE tariff reclassification — once you exceed a threshold over a rolling 12-month window, the meter shifts to the high-consumption "DAC" tariff and the peso/kWh rate roughly doubles. Bills feel high because they ARE high, not because consumption changed.
- Net-metering reconciliation timing — your solar production isn't always credited monthly; some bills show net consumption while production credits sit in a 12-month rolling balance you haven't read.
A good technician does five things in this order: reads the last 12 CFE bills (looking for tariff category shifts), opens the inverter monitoring portal and compares daily production vs delivery, walks every breaker with a clamp meter to identify what's actually drawing, photographs the CT placement at the meter, and checks the inverter standby/idle draw with the panels covered.
Local context
Expat-heavy groups in Puerto Morelos often compare peso bills without the same tariff context; solar adds a second metering story (consumption vs production vs net billing). Neighborhoods such as Selva include mixed vintages — old fridges alone can creep usage, but they rarely explain teens of kWh per day sustained without other circuits.
