electricity

[sparkgrrl658.livejournal.com]

out of curiosity, would anyone like to share their high/low electric bills?

i'm in a one level 3 bedroom with typically only two people home and probably one or two nights of a/c in one of the bedrooms last month, and i think our bill is outrageous (over $400). we do have a washer/dryer (new front loading high efficiency ones) but that is not new and our bill seems to continually increase.

just wondering if this really is out of the norm before i have a talk with my roommate, see the actual bill*, and maybe call the electric company.

thanks!
eta: thanks SO much for all the feedback you guys - i've never had to deal with this before so i appreciate all the things to check for (rather than just nstar screwing us for the hell of it or my roommate being shady).

*i realize those two factors could mean a lot of different things going on here, but i'd still like to get an idea of 'average' in the area :) i know you can also call and get highest/lowest bills for previous tenants, but that actually hasn't proved very useful in the past.

Comments

[808.livejournal.com]

Every electric bill I've received shows you your prior monthly usage for the last 12 months, so you can compare your current month to the same month a year ago. The important thing is to compare usage, not cost, because electricity costs continually rise now that it's deregulated. Nothing we can do about that. FWIW, my 2BR with 4 people on the 3rd floor of a 120-year old house (me, wife, 2 family members and 2 cats!) was $80 last month. That's no AC, only laptops, lots of fans and a washer but no dryer.

Square Footage?

[shana-lyons.livejournal.com]

Sure, we'll share. This should be interesting. We have a two-level 3br/2ba with two people and central whole-house A/C, washer, dryer, etc and our bill last month was $120. It ranges from $75 or so in the winter (gas heat, hot water, and cooking) to $250 in August if we're really cranking the AC.

Do you have any idea what the square footage of your apartment is? Ours is like 1650.

$400 seems high if that's for one month.

[wheeiminvisible.livejournal.com]

I live with two other people in about 700 sq feet. Our bill in the summer (no AC) is usually between $35-$45.

[sparkgrrl658.livejournal.com]

yeah, i was only curious about cost in the meantime because i can't get my paws on the actual bill right now, so it's kind of the only variable i have to work with. shana has a good point though, i should figure out square footage since 3 bedroom can be huge or tiny, relevant if people are running a/c, etc.

[wickedtrue.livejournal.com]

Wow, that sounds like a lot. Do you have several a/cs going constantly?

We have a a two level 3br with 3 people, and our electric bill is normally between $50 - $85, and that's with an a/c. We do have a lot of energy efficient appliances and all our lights have the low watt bulbs, but even before we did the switch over, our electric bill never got over $100.

Re: Square Footage?

[sparkgrrl658.livejournal.com]

i'll see if i can find out somehow since i don't know off the top of my head. i can say that my room is the smallest, enough room for a bed/dresser/bookcase and not much else. the middle bedroom is a tiny bit bigger, and the largest bedroom is unoccupied since one of my roommates is moving out and has basically been living w/ his girlfriend.

when i lived in quincy in a two bedroom it was a bit smaller than this (obviously) but we also had central air that we used pretty consistently and the only time our bill was this high was when i hadn't paid it in months.

[sparkgrrl658.livejournal.com]

no. my roommate is the only one with an a/c in his bedroom and he used it for maybe a couple days/nights (given this bill doesn't count for the recent crazy hot spell).

we have one small window fan in the living room and i have one wimpy stand up type fan in my bedroom.

[thespian.livejournal.com]

we have a 3 bedroom, one room currently empty, ac in one room, no washer/dryer, but two computer nerd nightowls. Our bill ending June 22 was $45.62

[ericjay.livejournal.com]

I'm in a 3-bedroom, second floor unit w/ central AC (that we use regularly, but keep set on 76° and our most recent electric bill was $59. My last apartment was a large 2 bedroom with two window AC units going fairly regularly. Our highest electric bill last summer was $87. I can't possibly imagine what you're using that would add up to $400/month worth of electricity!

[sparkgrrl658.livejournal.com]

yeah, this seems to be the general consensus (i asked in my personal journal as well) :/ now all that remains is to get to the bottom of it, and i'm not terribly looking forward to it...

[lunarcamel.livejournal.com]

Possibly unhelpful: Our electric bill was crazy high and it turned out we were paying for the lights in the common areas (we discovered this when we blew a fuse in our apartment and the lights in the basement weren't working either). That's super duper illegal and our landlord ended up owing us a few G's, so I hope for your sake it's something awesome like that.

[kalibex.livejournal.com]

Any possibility that someone's stealing electricity from you guys?

$400 is way too high

[wardv.livejournal.com]

2 BR condo here, three people, about 1000 sq ft. Last month was about $85 - don't think we used the A/C at all in that period. This includes an electric water heater, which I suspect to be responsible for a good fraction of that cost.

If this jump was sudden, you could have a malfunctioning device (electric water heater?)...

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I have a big 2br, about 1600 sq ft, 3rd floor, been running window AC almost around the clock on hot days (bedroom at night, office in the day-- I work from home). I have a desktop computer and a Tivo that are both on 24/7, plus a big TV that I watch a few hours a day on average. I also run the dishwasher about once a week or so. My electric bill for June 22 was the highest it's been since I moved here in September, and it's only $65.82 (370 KWH, for 33 days).

I don't have a washer/dryer in the unit, and almost all the lights are fluorescent. Still, I'd say $400/month is well out of the norm.

Might there be something wrong with the refrigerator? Have you noticed it running more often than usual?

[sparkgrrl658.livejournal.com]

our set up is is a two family house i guess you would say, where we have the top half & attic and our neighbor has the bottom half and basement. we do have a porch light though that's been on more since they've moved in and i'm not sure how that works, but even still probably doesn't explain everything. sigh!

[sparkgrrl658.livejournal.com]

i'm not sure. i just googled it (i've heard of it but wasn't sure how you'd even do it) and it looks like no matter what i'll have to be calling our electric company to get to the bottom of this.

Re: $400 is way too high

[sparkgrrl658.livejournal.com]

it was similar the month before, but i think if i recall correctly it was more reasonable prior to that, so that is a possibility, thanks!

[sparkgrrl658.livejournal.com]

then i'd better go catch it i suppose...

heh. but no, not in particular, tho as mentioned above it could be another appliance too.

[bettyw.livejournal.com]

What kind of electric meter do you have - is it wirelessly read by the passing meter truck, or is it an old analog one that someone has to visually read? Is there a possibility that the meter was recently changed out for a new one?

- Sometimes when they switch meters, the reading gets messes up.
- If it's a manual read one, if they've been estimating for some months and then get a real reading, it can turn out they were underestimating for a long time so they "catch up".
- I once received a bill for several THOUSAND dollars on a meter for an office I use so rarely that I do not use 1 kilowatt in a month; turned out they had read the meter wrong, so it looked like it had gone totally around the max reading!

[masswich.livejournal.com]

Unless there are a lot of common area lights and they are on all the time I doubt they would add up to much, certainly not the couple of hundred extra on the bill in question...

But it might be contributing.

[alphacygni]

A few G's? I'm curious, because that's totally the situation in our apartment, but we've never confronted the landlord on it because we don't want to get into a nasty escalation of hostilities. But we figured from some investigation (using a kill-a-watt, which is an awesome device when trying to figure out electrical usage) that it's costing us about $50/month or so to pay for all the common stuff, but I'm not sure how that could translate into a few G's. How did that happen, if you don't mind me asking?

[lizzielizzie.livejournal.com]

Two things:
1) Make sure the bill is an actual read, and not the culmination of several incorrect estimates.
2) Go outside and figure out which meter is yours. Then go inside and flip all your circuit breakers off. Go back outside and see if the meter is spinning. If so, you are paying for electricity coming from somewhere outside your apartment. If not, flip your breakers back on one by one until everything is working again in your apt...maybe you have a circuit in your apartment that powers something somewhere else, and you're paying for it.

[vintaged-lust.livejournal.com]

In one of my apartments in college the downstairs electric was tied to the heating somehow -- which I learned after our hot water was turned off since they never paid the bill. Not sure what your heating or hot water situation is but perhaps your unit supplies everywhere?

[beezy515.livejournal.com]

I received an electric bill like that once. I called up NStar and they said that there had been a mistake in the meter reading for that month. They fixed it in a matter of minutes. Good luck!

[sparkgrrl658.livejournal.com]

if you have an electric hot water heater, well, yeah. anyways, we do pay for heat hot water but we aren't in a big building, we share a house with one other couple. i'll have to wait until tomorrow to take a look outside at things, so while that could be contributing, i think it might still be strange if it were hundreds of dollars worth. sigh. i really hope there is one answer though, as opposed to a bunch of little ones. but either way, i appreciate all the ideas and advice i've gotten so far :)