Electricity Bill Sticker Shock
Well, I thought the last bill was bad as it was over $200.00, but this recent one topped it easily! Has anyone else gotten a $371.00 electric bill this month? Talk about an “electric shock”! My wife about came unglued when she opened our latest bill from Stream Energy. We are locked in for a year at 11.9 cents per kilowatt hour. According to the bill, we somehow managed to use 3009 KWH in the last billing cycle. I just don’t get it. We have done nothing different from last year (except we are paying about half a cent more this year over last year). Even with all the days we were over the 100 degree mark, I still can’t see how we used that much power. We keep the air conditioning at 78 (occasionally, I sneak it down to 77 but that only lasts until the wife catches it). We also keep ceiling fans running throughout the house just like we did the same time last year. Yet, we used roughly 683 KWH more than we did last year. Obviously, I need to do some kind of energy audit on our house and figure out where the extra power is going. Time to do more research! If anyone has any public service type links they can share, please pass them along with any advice you can provide relative to experience implementing energy saving tips. Meanwhile, I did manage to bury a decent ground for my RF harvesting experiments in the wife’s rose bed while she was out shopping. Now I just need to get a bus bar connected to it in the garage. Never enough hours in a day. – DV
July 29th, 2009 at 4:37 am
Have you considered the possibility that there is an issue with your electric meter?
While Oncor (rather than Stream Energy) reads your meter results monthly and would normally take note of any vast abnormalities relative to historic usage, you may wish to contact Oncor and determine as to whether there is a malfunction in your electricity meter. While rare, there are sometimes functional issues that Oncor does not catch.
I hope that helps!
July 30th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Rob,
Thank you. That is certainly one consideration I had not thought about, because as you pointed out, it would indeed be a rare occurrence. Now, I have another issue to figure out. When I was trying to determine monthly KWH usage averages over the course of the previous year, I made what seems to be a horrible assumption. As I went back through my billing statements from Stream Energy, I looked at the bar graph that depicts a usage look-back over the previous months. Much to my surprise, as I laid out each months billing statement in chronological order, I saw a scary trend emerge. The peak months of usage and associated KWH used was shifting months with each billing statement. It makes sense that during the summer months here in Texas that the use would increase given the heat and air conditioning usage. But what I witnessed as I examined each billing statement closely was that those peaks were pretty darn agile. With that said, it has become obvious that one can not depend upon the graphed usage of KWH as an accurate measure of how much electricity you actually consumed in any given month. You have to examine each statement to see what the real use was, then tally your results and develop your average KWH usage. This was also a bit of a “shock” seeing those use peaks moving with each statement. – DV
August 16th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
*Update on meter function.
Well, we had an Oncor service tech come out to the house this past week to check our meter. It would appear it is functioning perfectly, so now I guess it is time to go out and get a meter to see how much draw certain appliances are placing on the system. Will post the results on how much electricity the household is consuming as soon as I can lay my hands on a decent meter and get it done.
- DV
November 1st, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Well, it has been a while, but the good news is that I have procured a “Kill-A-Watt” meter. Now the bad news is that I have yet to have an opportunity to use it and completely calculate the household energy use. It would seem the seasonal use of electricity is coming back into the sane realm again, but it sure is still a pain paying a bit more than $200.00 on the last go round. I have a lot of work coming up this week, but hopefully during the following week I will get a chance to do the energy audit. If anyone is interested, I’ll make certain some forms get posted to make it easier for anyone else wanting to do an audit for their own purposes. Have a great week!
- DV
January 28th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
Happy New Year! Well, we made it into 2010 but what a wild ride getting through 2009. That little Kill-A-Watt meter is a handy device! I was actually amazed at the consumption rates I measured. My Whirlpool Gold refrigerator was impressive and actually costing me less per day than I could have imagined at less than $0.22 per day! Even the 52 Inch LCD Philips TV and associated DVD players, and WII console were drawing less than $0.17 per day! Of course, it wasn’t more than about 2 weeks from measuring the refrigerator consumption rate and it completely died on us. That was a lot of wasted food! I guess I should be happy to have gotten 9 years of use out of it, but its still a tough pill to swallow. On a positive note, we did find a great deal on a replacement at the local Sears scratch-n-dent/repair facility. The wife got what she wanted, and we saved about $800.00 on the new appliance. I had to look awefully hard, to figure out what was wrong with a brand new refridgerator, but finally narrowed it down to a scrap on the top edge of the left door that is only visable when you actually open the unit! Now I guess I should probably meter out the new one and see how much electricity it actually is using. Anyway, welcome to 2010 and I think we are in for a truly amazing year in the alternative energy sector.
Best Regards,
–DV