Super High Electric Bill

$639! That’s up $100 from last month and more than double any bill from last winter.

I know it’s been a cold winter, but… what the …?!

We’ve had problems with the furnace, a geothermal unit that’s supposed to be energy efficient, but… what the …?!

We had even sealed off the upper floor where our bedroom is and have been living downstairs for the entire month to see if we could trim our bill!

Cecie, my better half, called the electric company to find out what, if anything, we could do. I pulled out our furnace repair bills from the filing cabinet, and we compared notes. We told the lady at the electric company the dates on which the heating guy was at our house.

Turns out that on 1/13/2010, the day after he replaced a circuit board in the furnace and recharged the system, our electricity usage dropped by about half the previous day’s usage and stayed that way for some time.

Two weeks later, on 1/26/2010, the furnace was on the blink again. The heating guy came out to fix it that same day. The lady at the electric company said from that day forward, our usage was back up.

I asked Cecie to ask the lady from the electric company if she could send us a daily usage report for the past month. The lady said sure, but you could get the data more quickly by going to MyUsage.com.

I immediately headed to MyUsage.com, logged on, created an account, and pulled up a list of our daily electricity usage. Unbelievably cool! Why hadn’t I known about this?! You can even have your daily electricity usage emailed to you and/or have a warning emailed to you when your usage exceeds a particular level! (Not all electric companies are plugged into MyUsage.com.)

Then, I headed to the Weather Underground and pulled up a temperature history for my Zip code, so I could see whether the correlation in electricity usage was due more to temperature changes or our furnace woes.

From the data, I could clearly see that the correlation was directly related to our furnace woes. Note the bold rows where dramatic changes in our electricity usage occurred. These dates correspond to visits from the furnace repair guy.