Wife and I leave the thermostat at 68 during the winter for our 1300 sq ft rental house. We have a heat pump. Our utility providers rates are 0.08 c/kWh - 0.09 c/kWh. Our entire bill is combined (water, trash, and electricity) and we almost always below $200 per month. The only time it will go over $200 is in Jan or Feb.

68* is the magic number it seems, 70* can feel hot at times and 72* is stifling , for me. I wear a sweat shirt or what have you over a long sleeve and I am winterized.

This Year my electric bill including baseboard heat and lights etc. hit a all time low of $70 per month on the equal payment plan. I credit that to my conservation in the house as a whole in this 2,000sq ft. 1970's house.

How many people living in the house?

We are still finding 21C/69.8F is just about perfect for us.
I wear long sleeve medium weight shirts over tee-shirts.
If I have to visit the basement, the hoodie goes on..

It's been so cold lately, we are burning up the kwh like crazy this year..
We are going to burn over 800 kwh during this cycle. (136USD).
Almost 27 kwh per day on average. Not been this cold in a while.
These 20 days of Dec 2013 ave= 28.6 °F.
It was warmer the last two years.. We got off easy. :p
Averages of 35.2 °F in 2012 and 36.8 °F in 2011

This last month had some pretty deep drops in temp..
That's when the Sanyos suck up a lot of wattage..
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1387542479
At least they are deep for the Boston area (near the sea)..

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...ps2dae2e6a.jpg

Mostly just me and my fearless Guard Dog a 110# Organic Heater.
Also i am not heating the downstairs , the heaters down there are on the freeze stand by setting or right next to the off click on the wall thermostats. I have conserved a lot of energy just by paying attention to the kill a watt meter and doing adjustments. My TV now uses around 50 watts instead of 150 watts just by turning the back lighting down in the TV's menu and turning the brightness up (it uses no wattage to turn the brightness up , oddly enough) Unplugged
a UPS power back up for the computer that was drawing 30 watts 24-7 for years.
Turned the water heater Way down , insulated my fridge extensively, the list goes on.
Last year I put white Styrofoam sheet from a large package over unused north facing window , its accumulative conserving really.

We stay warmer than most here 68-69 @ night then 72-74 during the day.
This is for the main living areas (using the mini splits). We keep the some rooms unheated for the most part and leave the doors open this helps heat them.

Your temperatures are more common than most on this message board. The members here as a whole are "conservation geeks" and keep their heat cooler than average, AC warmer than average. Average for our area is 70 heat/75 cool.

Our mini-splits had to be shut down last night. Too much blowing snow
was causing a lot of defrost cycles. They were still pumping in some
heat down to around 4 degrees, but the power use was extra high.
We plugged in some space heaters and also burned some oil.

A failure of the circulating pump kept me up most of the night.
At least I had cable TV to watch..
Dark Matter Does Matter! | National Geographic Channel
(The show turned out to be about everyone on earth being frozen solid)..


We only had about three good Sanyo hours during the day today.
Today's Extremes
High Temperature 11.9°F @ 1:56pm
Low Temperature -0.4°F @ 9:37pm
It's amazing how much heat they can pull out of 10-12 deg air..
It actually got a little too warm this afternoon!

It's zero now and heading south! We are burning oil like it was cheap..
Got a few space heaters running too.

The logging program is shows we are holding between 68 & 69 F tonight. (so far).
Very close to the settings we use with the Sanyos.

We made 61.1 kwh yesterday good solar day but it was cold so at the end of the day we ended up using 4.4 kwh heating with mini splits and one car charge.

This is why Ground Source Heat Pumps were invented.

-AC