Woot! Lowest power bill in years!
 

This month, our electricity bill was a grand total of $100.99. That's the cheapest power bill I have ever had to pay.

The house is 100% on-grid and the bill regularly was $200-250.

I'm pretty happy with that.

You guys seeing costs reduced by usage drops?

I can't really say much. I've only gotten two bills since I've been in the house. However, I did see a huge drop my second month after going through and replacing most of the lights with CFLs. Here is my tracking of my bills.

What did your actual usage come out to?

Mine's always been included, so I never know.

Managed to get a 10% rebate at my parents' place this summer though - incentive was: reduce power use by 10%, get a 10% bonus on top of the savings.

I'm about to move for the winter though, and I'll have an electricity bill...

My meter is read every three months and I just received a bill with my actual usage on it (in between months are billed on estimates). We used 988KWh over the last three months. Although I just completed an audit which should reduce our consumption by about 50KWh per month, I expect total usage over the next three months to be about the same just because of the time of year. Days are shorter so we spend more on lighting, the boiler pump runs more often, more TV watching, etc. I'll have to compare our consumption to the same period last year to see if I made any improvements.

Usage was 966 KWh. According to the 13 month breakdown on the bill, last years usage for this month was 2000 KWh. The real test will be in February. Last years usage was 3060 KWh.

Congrats, it's always a good thing to achieve a personal record :thumbup:

Here the meter is read only twice a year and the 10 monthly bills are based on the 2 last reads. The first year we got 1 MWh/month while the second, with the baby born so more heat in winter and more hot water used, we got 1.2 MWh/month.

We are using CFL (nearly) everywhere since years, so we have to be careful else where.
I replaced 2 24/7 computers by second hand laptops => from 180W/h to 40W/h, ie 1600 kWh/yr to 350 :)
The old 28" CRT TV broke this year and has been replaced by a 30" LCD TV, which is certainly another gain :) but I can't evaluate it.
We didn't switched on the portable AC this summer, we used the newly installed ceiling fans in the living room and installed some "canisse" (sorry I can't find the English translation) to shade the terrace and some windows. The 2 ceiling fans are consuming at most 55W/h each while the AC was consuming 900W/h :)

I decided to note my consumption from time to time. I created a little spreadsheet to calculate the daily average between two personal reads. During the 26 days before we switched on the radiators we got 20.5 kWh/day (11 by day and 9.5 by night). During the 25 days since the radiators are switched on we got 32.0kWh/day (17.5 by day and 14.5 by night). An extrapolation gives a final bill of 600€/yr instead of 1200€ for last year.
Of course by now the temperatures are not so low and during the days before they were not so high so these consumptions are the minimal ones... If we can keep it under 900-1000€/yr it will be satisfying :cool:

We audited the heat system and the conclusion is it's under powered, so the radiators are consuming more than they should :eek: . We will see what we can do, but until then we'll try to be smarter than during last year. Don't forget that how you use things is as important as things you use. The first step is to keep the doors closed between the different zones (:eek: I can see a door opened, the reflex aren't here yet... closed :cool:).

Denis.

We have central heat but have the same problem. It's not adequate for the house. The central heat and air is the main cause of the inflated bills we've paid in the past and the damn thing doesn't work. lol. It's amazing to me that even though I know it doesn't work well, there is still the urge to turn it on when it's too hot or too cold. Old habits die hard I guess.

We put an electric mattress pad on the bed and move a space heater with us when we go from room to room now. There's no way I'm going to turn that central heat back on this year. I can't believe someone actually chose to market the system for this home. It's a mobile home so the system came installed from the factory.

I plan to try some solar cooling tricks this summer to try and limit the use of the window unit we switched to even though we've seen a 45% decrease in usage from using it instead of the central unit... That held true even in august and we were more comfortable than the previous summer.