A large house with high ceilings, an under powered and poorly designed air conditioning system running 24/7, a pool, and a koi pond with a 3.5hp pump running 24/7.
This happened in a very hot August. Our normal bill for gas and electric ran$12-1400/mo.
PG&E was a pioneer in punitive rates for home users who used a lot of electricity. On top of that the base rates were consistently higher than anywhere else because of Gov. Davis’ boneheaded locking in of rates when energy was at its peak price.
@Thomas No, I don’t remember what the rate was just that it was pretty high.
Where we were in California you had the choice of getting gas and electricity from PG&E, or you could get it from PG&E. Even if you used solar power, you still had to buy your electricity from PG&E.
Everyone keeps mentioning growing weed as the potential culprit for neighbors siphoning off electricity—would just like to point out the growing possibility of their mining crypto. @TiaG, no one in your house is secretly generating bitcoin, right?
As someone who lives in the great Pacific Northwest and currently benefits from the Hydro dams, and pays an electric bill of about $100 a month ($40-$140) I would lose my mind if my electricity bill was over $1000 a month. That is just crazy. Even when we lived in MN it was only like $300 a month at the peak of winter. Wow.
Ours last month was $628 – and we were freezing. I’m currently setting the house temperature at night to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. So I just can’t imagine that there’s not some hidden problem, as PG&E identified us as having significantly higher energy usage than typical households and yet we’re totally freezing all the time, we don’t have a TV, and we were not running our laundry very frequently.
I’d turn off the electric baseboards and just run the gas furnace… use a ceiling fan (blowing upward in winter) to circulate the central heat out into the bedrooms.
Something is wrong there… that doesn’t add up. It was your first bill in this house right? I wonder how the transition worked to the new account—- did your end up paying the last 6 months worth of usage inadvertently before you even lived there?
The biggest culprit is often electric water heaters…
Or maybe because the furnace went out the electric baseboards (which use a ton of power) ran way way more than they should have…
@Sam, yeah I think something doesn’t add up either; I’m requesting an energy audit and we’ve stopped running the kids’ heat in their room except for the half hour before bed and then we are using hot water bottles, undershirts, socks and warm blankets to keep them toasty during the night time. (a fan won’t be able to circulate air from the furnace-heated areas because of how the house is configured, unfortunately)
The baseboards have to be manually turned on; they’re not on a thermostat. And the kids have two huge, non-double-paned uninsulated windows in their room so it’s super cold too.
I guess I’m confused about whether 20kwH per day makes sense as a baseline energy usage in a house with no heat on and no appliances other than two fridges running (and maybe like a microwave plugged in but not running). Is that a lot? Is that a little? Our energy bills in our old place were always about $150 in the winter, even when the downstairs people kept it stiflingly hot all night, so I’m just so flummoxed.
That’s a little less than we use in a 3000 sf house, but we’re not using electric for anything except the lights, tv, ovens, drier, and refrigerator and freezer, water pump, and HrV (ventilation). Our water and home heat are all from an oil fired boiler… so yeah I think 20 / day isn’t bad for a family of 4
What’s the price / kWh? Sometimes you have to do a little figuring with all the fees and taxes to get the real bottom line figure…
Think a fridge compressor is typically about 5a… so 5x120= .6 kw x 24 (if it was running 24 hours / day… which it shouldn’t be ) 14.4 x2 28.8kwh if they were running continuously… they’re probably running closer to 1/2 of the time I’d WAG so you’re two fridges might be somewhere around 15/ day
The first tier (lowest baseline) is 19 cents per kWh, the second tier is 27 cents per kWh, and our “high usage” penalty cost is 40 cents per kWh…According to PG&E we used a total of 1,318 kWh last month, which works out to about 44 kWh per day. Which doesn’t sound huge to me but then again it’s a combination of like 80 kWH per day on some days and 20 kWh on others when we’re not around… so something is happening when we’re in the house that’s sucking up electricity.
I mean, if PG&E just wants to punish people for using electricity and everyone was paying such high fees I wouldn’t feel so bad. It’s just the idea that we’re so far outside the norm (which they told us on our bill) really bothers me because we’re pretty miserable around here keeping things so cold, our house is a normal size (1900 sq feet for 5 people), and I don’t feel like we’re extravagant. Other than things like running a dishwasher once a day, occasionally vacuuming, we really don’t have much extra usage… I mean people need to eat on plates! There’s just not much I can imagine cutting out beyond heat. We already hardly used the lights during the day and it’s getting to the point where I’m considering wandering around with camping lights during the night. IT’s just hard to imagine that everyone else in SF is living like that to keep their energy bills down…
The 1318 kWH was about 350?
The gas portion of the bill was $180 – but there are a bunch of other fees on the bill to get to $628, so I’m not including those because we can’t really do much about them.
I’m not sure. Some are weird things I have no idea about – like SF Clean Power Generation Plan. Others are “conservation incentive” charges (about $70) which basically means an extra-cherry-on-top punishment surcharge for high usage which is presumably per kWH. And then then there are things like nuclear decomissioning that are presumably fixed…The distribution and transmission, though, are only about $160…
It’s almost always heat producing appliances that run a lot that are the smoking gun… I don’t know how many hours those baseboards were running on a typical day but they could have been using a stupid amount of electricity every minute they’re on. I don’t know how many watts they’re burning but they could easily be 3,000 (minimum) to 6000 watts to heat 2 rooms especially if they’re poorly insulated.
So if they’re using 5,000 watts and they were on even 4 hours / day that’s 20kwh right there
Drier, oven, vacuum etc only are running short periods at a time and don’t generaly add up to much
hmm, it may be worth it to replace their windows with more insulating ones then, because I don’t think it’s fair to the kids to have them freeze in their play room and bedroom.
I think it’s worth noting too that at least half of the bill seems to be essentially punishment for high usage or some weird fees I don’t understand … clean power plan, higher usage tiers, and “conservation incentive” add up to about 320 of the bill…
So i guess if we got the medical baseline it might conceivably reduce our costs quite a lot…
3M Indoor Window Insulator Kit, 5-Window https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00002NCJI/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_kp9uAbJNGBSZN These are a short term solution that might give you some more insight on whether it’s worth upgrading to higher quality windows… if you see a big difference with these you probably would with better windows too.
In our house, my wife and I use 20kwH per day (we have oil heat). I’d guess that your electric heat is the biggest problem. There may be other easy places to trim costs. For instance, if you have incandescent light bulbs they can really add up. (You mentioned track lighting.) 20 lit bulbs throughout the house at 50 watts each on average is a kilowatt, so if the lights are on from 4 til midnight that’s 8kwH per day right there. Led bulbs are about 10 times more efficient, as are good florescents. The energy survey should be quite helpful in figuring out where your costs and opportunities are.
