The electricity drawn by appliances and lighting represents a significant fraction of the total energy used in residential buildings. As construction techniques improve and as building regulations become more stringent, it is expected that the relative significance of these non-HVAC electrical loads will grow. Not only is the annual energy consumption of non-HVAC electrical loads of growing importance, their temporal distribution influences the operation of energy conversion equipment within the building and in the electrical supply network. This work provides new measured data on the electrical consumption of a sample of 12 Canadian houses. Measurements at 1-min intervals were taken of whole-house electricity draws, as well as the draws of individual devices, including the furnace, air-conditioner, range/cooker, clothes dryer, dishwasher, and domestic hot water heater. The annual consumption patterns of the 12 houses were found to range widely. Furthermore, daily variations in the temporal distribution of electrical loads of each house were found to be significant. The probability distribution of some of the measured data was compared with previously developed synthetically derived non-HVAC electric load profiles, and it was found that the latter do not adequately capture either the temporal variability nor the variation between households observed in the measurements. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.