electricity

To the left you’ll see my first electric bill for my new home ( Click on it to make it full-size ). $123.17 doesn’t seem bad, considering its’ for a 2732 square foot, two story home in southern Texas. However, I’m extremely disappointed. For the last week weeks of the month, we didn’t use the air conditioner - not once. It was pretty cool outside, and stayed about 71-72 degrees inside, which is comfortable enough for us.

Taking this into account, I’m really surprised that my bill was so high. There are a few things out of my control - there’s a total of $11.06 for availability charges. There’s also $17.99 for city services ( including my trash pickup ), and $1.45 in taxes. That’s a total of $30.50 that I have to pay, even if I use zero energy at all.

Natural Gas - This is new

I’ve never had natural gas before, so I’m not sure if 15 cubic feet is good or bad. My house has two gas water heaters, so that probably doesn’t help. They built it that way to ensure that the residents of 4 bedrooms and 3 full baths would never run out of water. Great for when we have guests, but probably very wasteful the rest of the time. I may look into shutting down one of these water heaters to save on the natural gas.

Electricity - Yikes

My family of three used over 1 Megawatt-hour of electricity last month. And that’s without A/C for two weeks, and with several appliances running on natural gas ( my old apartment was 100% electric ). This is something that truly needs a lot of work.

What to do?

There probably isn’t a whole lot I can do to reduce my electric bill. My winter bills should drop slightly as A/C isn’t needed at all, but the summer could be scary. I will be continuing to convert all my light bulbs to CFL’s. There are a ton of lights in the house, and there’s a huge potential savings here, I think. I’m planning to have this finished up by next weekend, so it won’t be until January’s bill that the full effects will show. After all, the less I spend on gas and electric, the more I can save and invest.

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