Mine was caused by one of my tenants. Don't get housemates unless you have a lot of patience.
This was in September, which in Minnesota can have large swings on a clear sunny day from temperatures in the 80s down to night temperatures in the 50s.
On this particular night in September, the air conditioner was set to run in the evening after the sun went down, usually it satisfies the thermostat and shuts down before it gets cold outside, but one of the roommates decided to lower the thermostat, the temperature wasn't met and it continued to get into the high 50's outside with a dew point hugging that temperature(which means don't open the windows unless you like mold in your basement!). A temperature in the 50s is a recipe for a frozen coil. The coil froze and the air conditioner ran for over 24 hours before shutting off at midnight the next night. This used 67.5kwh in a day. The part that bothered me the most is my hi/low thermometer showed that it was 64 degrees at some point.
For a comparison, I've managed 7 months in 2015 using less power than that day! Imagine how upset I was about this.
Now that same housemate is trying to turn the temperature up on the thermostat on a daily basis. He doesn't seem to care how much the utilities cost or care at all about energy usage, which was something that we discussed in depth before he moved in, but he was just being a non-committed yes man. It's hard to not kick this person out. He's also relatively uneducated with willful ignorance and is noisy at night. I keep telling myself the income from sharing the house is worth the trouble. It's not money that I need but it's helpful to have in order to save extra money and fund hobbies.
The other housemate uses two TVs at the same time and watches Netflix on one with a gaming system and plays video games on the other at the same time. This amounts to about 8kwh per day, just doing that. It used to be more back when I let them use my big screen(105" screen) projector but that uses 200 watts on its own and it would be running for 8 hours a day plus the gaming system they connected to it. Once the bulb burned out, I haven't bothered replacing it and I work allow them to buy the bulb because then they will feel they have some level of 'ownership' should I decide to not let them use my projector. Since I didn't use it too much anyway, mostly due to the thoughts of its energy consumption, I'll probably never buy the bulb. I'm considering an LED 4k projector once they have a reasonable price if the power level is reasonable, say 100 watts or less. The 200 watt was far brighter than I needed.
The thing that bothers me the most about the whole thing is my solar system used to give me plenty of bill credits and I'd always produce at least as much power, but almost always more than I used, but with roommates they use gobs of power, leave lights, fans, and TVs on when they leave the room for extended periods of time. I figure towards the end of 2017 it'll be time for both to leave because I'll have my spent the money to get my IFR rating and mostly funded other things I want to fund. If one leaves on their own accord, the other will likely get kicked out shortly after.
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