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Outrageous Power bill
KiTA
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So when I moved into my new place here, the power bill for the first month (covering Nov) was around $50. We had the heat turned off for the first bit, trying to avoid bills et all, got it turned on towards the end of November. It's an electric stove and water heater, and gas heat. Central air, big furnace downstairs with pipes and vents in the various rooms of the house.
I got the bill today for December's power usage. $195. Our power usage has gone up from 300 kWh to 2400 kWh.
I wasn't even at HOME for 2 weeks in December (although my roommate and his wife were).
The major changes in December that I know of was that the roommates stopped using the space heaters, I bought myself an electric blanket, and I set up my grow lights.
(I grow Venus Flytraps and other carnivorous plants, and my current living situation precludes growing them in a sunny window or somesuch.)
I had the lights up at the old apartment, where I'd run them from when I woke up until I went to bed, usually in the range of 12-16 hours a day. At the current place I was using a timer for 16 hours a day, now I have it set to 12 (and might move it to 8). The thing is, at the old place, my power bill was only $55ish -- the lights, a set of 4 4' long fluorescent lights (basically shop lights) only cost a few dollars a month.
I think I'm seeing something else going on, like a short or something, but I have no idea where to begin trying to track it down. There's nothing new in my gadget setup downstairs that I haven't ran at the old apartment (although some of the surge protectors are new), and the bill there was way cheaper than this. Upstairs neighbor has a big screen TV, surround sound system, etc, but again, he says his bill has never been anywhere close to this.
There is an exposed wire downstairs, where the landlady and her husband (a "contractor") started to put in a second light, ran out of time, and just clipped the end of the wire off and rolled it up. I would think that that would have caused the power in December to be outrageous, too, however, so that's probably not it.
Any ideas as to where I can begin tracking it down? I was thinking of timing how fast the dial is spinning outside and then unplugging *everything* for about an hour.
I got the bill today for December's power usage. $195. Our power usage has gone up from 300 kWh to 2400 kWh.
I wasn't even at HOME for 2 weeks in December (although my roommate and his wife were).
The major changes in December that I know of was that the roommates stopped using the space heaters, I bought myself an electric blanket, and I set up my grow lights.
(I grow Venus Flytraps and other carnivorous plants, and my current living situation precludes growing them in a sunny window or somesuch.)
I had the lights up at the old apartment, where I'd run them from when I woke up until I went to bed, usually in the range of 12-16 hours a day. At the current place I was using a timer for 16 hours a day, now I have it set to 12 (and might move it to 8). The thing is, at the old place, my power bill was only $55ish -- the lights, a set of 4 4' long fluorescent lights (basically shop lights) only cost a few dollars a month.
I think I'm seeing something else going on, like a short or something, but I have no idea where to begin trying to track it down. There's nothing new in my gadget setup downstairs that I haven't ran at the old apartment (although some of the surge protectors are new), and the bill there was way cheaper than this. Upstairs neighbor has a big screen TV, surround sound system, etc, but again, he says his bill has never been anywhere close to this.
There is an exposed wire downstairs, where the landlady and her husband (a "contractor") started to put in a second light, ran out of time, and just clipped the end of the wire off and rolled it up. I would think that that would have caused the power in December to be outrageous, too, however, so that's probably not it.
Any ideas as to where I can begin tracking it down? I was thinking of timing how fast the dial is spinning outside and then unplugging *everything* for about an hour.
KiTA on
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e: also, for a house in the winter, $200 is not really outrageous
If you have electric heat maybe. Our electric bill is about $50 a month in a turn of the century duplex.
I know our electric bill went up $50 and the only thing that changed was Christmas lights.
I don't see it -- says "reading type: regular" and the Meter Readings have specific numbers.
This page (linked from another thread on page 2) suggests blowing the breaker and then going to see if the power meter stops dead, I'll try that in the morning.
Edit: It's gas heat. If it was electric heat I'd be fine, but we also have a $50-someodd gas bill awaiting our attention on top of this nightmare of an electric bill.
What's worse is if whatever used 2000 kWhs started in the middle or end of the month, I could be looking at a $600, 800, etc power bill in Feb.
Edit2: No Christmas lights here.
Edit3: I asked the same question of the Carnivorous plants forum I go to, someone with a lot more light than me only pays $65 a month.
You're a little over 8 cents a KwH, which is pretty normal as well.
Unfortuantly, the bad part of living in a bigger house is a bigger bill for all the little things (power, water, taxes, etc).
Typical energy saving types are going to apply. Check if there are drafts anywhere you can plug, turn down the heat, turn down the temp of your hot water heater, bug the landlord for better insulation / better doors/windows.
I got some weather treatment stuff for the door in the garage, which is leaking air quite severely -- we've been putting up sheets to block the airflow from there, since the "quote-unquote contractor" landlord couldn't figure out how to install a door on the garage or on the downstairs stairwell.
Honestly going through the landlord is a lost cause -- the house is fairly obviously going to be foreclosed on... but that's a whole other story.
We're in Twin Falls, ID. The main floor has a living area, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, a kitchen and small dining area, and a garage that's been converted into a "study room" or somesuch nonsense (no one uses it as it's freezing cold out there). The downstairs has a living area, a wash room, a half finished bathroom, and 2 "rooms" -- one I use as my computer room, 1 I use as my bedroom. It's not a very big house at all, especially if you take into account the unfinished parts, although I don't have a square foot number.
I'm hoping there is a stupidly simple answer because I really, really can't afford electric bills this high, especially with two deadbeat roommates who are paying things "when they can" -- but that's another story.
My plan is to get a Kill-A-Watt thing tomorrow (Fred Meyer didn't have any, and Lowes is a long walk) and test the appliances tomorrow, I'll hopefully discover Deadbeat's waffle iron or my cheap electric blanket or somesuch shit is just shorting out.
Dude, I'm in Boise. If you're ever down here we should totally grab a beer. Hell, its a short drive, you should totally come down and grab a beer.
On topic: I'm going to assume you go through Idaho Power (like 90% of the state), and...yeah that kind of powerbill is extreme for Idaho Power. You might want to call them and see if they know anything, they are usually really helpful. When I had an apartment, I got a ridiculous bill one month (like 500 bucks when it was regularly 50 bucks).
I called them up and asked them what was going on, about 20 minutes later it was discovered they had charged my account 10 times over in a billing glitch. Told me they would send a proper bill, I got it 2 days later, it was 53 bucks.
Some times they make mistakes, but a simple call can resolve it. Other then that, check out the other suggestions here. Also, if you have a multimeter (you might, if you do computers), check that exposed wire. If you're getting live current it's drawing on your meter. Quite possible that connection was flipped off, and some one flipped on a light switch/breaker that started sending current.
On that subject, this is something to look into. Plug shit into every outlet and turn that shit on. Then start to flip wall switches, if you find one that doesn't turn on/off anything? That's possibly your culprit. With a single exposed wire, you run the risk of other exposed power connections that are constantly drawing big voltage off your meter.
Hope that helped!
There is an outlet in the kitchen that only half works, the bottom works, the top doesn't. That's the only outlet I know of that has problems.
The wiring in the house is all kinds of screwed up, to be honest. There's a reason I keep saying "quote-unquote contractor" -- this place would never, ever, EVER pass code.
The exposed wire is coming off the light downstairs -- it's designed to be installed in sequence, and instead of finishing the job they cut the wire about 2 feet down and rolled it up. It's literally a live, cut wire hanging out of the light switch, curled up into a ball to lessen the chances of running into it and, you know, dying.
But the odd thing is, all of this stuff was the same as it was the first month, nothing's changed.
I'm going to do the breaker thing (there's a phantom breaker in the "study room" that doesn't DO anything, as far as I know, as well as, perhaps, a phantom switch in the kitchen) and try for the Kill-A-Watt thing tomorrow as well. Fred Meyer had a multimeter, but I've never used one before, and was a bit afraid to fiddle.
In the meantime, I consolidated my power cords in my rooms, I have them down to 1 surge per outlet. I might try 2 in the living area, so I can have the consoles doing their own thing, but I can't imagine it's them.
And yes, next time I'm in Boise, first round's on me.
Indeed. I have gas heat, but electric water heater and stove in an 1800 sq ft house. The highest month I've ever had was 1100 kWh and that was in July last year when the AC was running for most of the month.
Unless you're running your electric blanket like ALL the time, I think there's something either wrong/misunderstood with the bill or faulty wiring/device.
For like $30 at Home Depot you can get a Kill A Watt ( http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-202196386/h_d2/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053 ) which you can start plugging your various lights, blanket, etc into for a period of time to see how much each is pulling. Alternatively, you can shut like everything off that you can, then go watch your meter and figure out how much it's using with everything off, then turn things on one by one and check the meter speed after each one to figure out if it's some particular item that's drawing so much.
What it came down to was: no insulation, single-pane windows (some of which were broken), doors that didn't fit the frames and were therefore extremely drafty, no flue in the fireplace to prevent air from escaping, etc. Our gas heater ran the entire winter non-stop, even though we turned the thermostat down to near-freezing. Our bill was consistently around $300 per month for a tiny house. For reference, my parents house, which is roughly double the size of where I was living, cost about $150 / month to heat during the winter.
The landlord's response to all this was "You open the front door too much."
You might just be SOL.
He has gas heat, so the electric bill shouldn't be as steep.
Now if you have electric baseboards, make sure they are off. Secondly determine the source of the excess usage by turning off all your breakers and measure the readings as you turn each one on. Maybe you have a broken hot water heater.
Ah yeah missed that. That is an abnormally large bill for gas heat. The only other thing I can think of is the hot water heater. There is no way lights/devices would do that unless he's got like 3 CRT TVs/Monitors running 24/7.
Maybe the hot water heater is heating water all day and throughout the night?
That was my thought too, either the heater is broken, or it is poorly insulated and the gas isn't heating the area it is in.
I'm thinking this. Here in Michigan, Consumer's does one read a year. You're on an estimate the rest of the year, for both gas and electricity. The month you get read, you might get a crazy high bill because you've been over the estimate all year, or you might get a crazy low (even negative) one because you've been overpaying all year. Getting a 300 to 2400 jump in December would only require you to be averaging 475 kwh a month, and picking up the overage in December. 475 isn't ridiculous.
At any rate, track your daily/weekly use on the meter, see how much you're using for January, so you don't get a nasty surprise in a couple weeks.
We did have the breaker blow (?) twice right before my vacation. Not sure if it went dead, or if it was a brownout in the area, but I'd come home to find my alarm clock and the stove time flashing 12. Not sure if the roommate turned the power back on when he got home, or what.
We've turned off the breaker in the garage-turned-study room.
I checked the meter today, 7506; it was 7270 when they read it on 1/5/11. That means in the past 6 days we've used 230 kWh. 38 kWh/Day is still 4 times as high as it was the first month, which was 11.9 kWh/Day. Going to take daily readings to see if something we've changed slowed it down.
Kill-A-Watt didn't find anything so far -- none of my gadgets et all are using much in the way of power, but it could have been a surge protector I've taken out of the loop or something. Waiting on the roommates to get home to test their appliances upstairs. The Grow Lights cost a few pennies a week to run, so they're going back to 16hr a day, although I'll put the Kill-A-Watt on it tonight to get a better reading.
I just got my latest electric bill and I used about 1400 kWH in a two month period. That's a 1600 square foot house with finished basement (so another 700 square feet maybe), forced air gas furnace, gas stove, but eletric everything else. We've also got christmas lights outside that are on from 5:30pm to about 4am, and our Christmas tree lights were on 24/7 during December.
My fiancee also leaves lights on like crazy for security reasons. She doesn't like the house to be dark when she's home alone, so routinely I'd say there are 5-8 bulbs going in the house.
Quick googling, says that a furnance can be 600 - 1500 watts. So lets say 1000 watts (or 1 KW). Over the last 6 days, you've had the heat on....half the time? So 12 hrs * 6 days * 1 kw = 72 kwh of your 230. Just for the furnace. See if you can find any documents or labels on it to see how much power it's taking.
It all adds up. Add a fridge, hot water, lights, computers, TV's, electric stove/oven? It gets up there.
So would I. As an avid fishkeeper (plant/reef lighting isn't hugely different than terrestrial growing) and the only constant I've found with any kind of high output lighting is that it's going to cost much more to run than it's "supposed to." High output T5s are the worst offenders, but halides are pretty bad, too. Some of the tests people have done with the new LED growing arrays are almost depressing in terms of just how little power they save over vastly cheaper setups.
Was also sent this on Terraforums:
The three things you said changed
- turned on the head
- stopped using space heaters (should mean LESS electric use), were you using them in december at all?
- electric blanket (shouldn't use much)
- grow lights
The roommate is saying he turned off all his stuff and the meter was still spinning, so therefore it has to be my stuff (and thus he shouldn't have to pay his share of the power bill), but I tested my stuff with the Kill-A-Watt and nothing was outrageous -- the highest was my PC, at $9 a month.
Fridge was $12. Microwave was absolutely insane, but it's not on 24x7, so that's tolerable. Can't test the water heater, oven, or dryer without just plugging/unplugging and checking.
Random thought: He moved his dryer in instead of the one that was already in the house last month. Could him screwing up the modular wire plugin thing you have to hook into the back of the dryer cause something like this?
So, yeah, really hoping I can find an answer tomorrow, or maybe discover tomorrow that the meter has only moved 10-20 instead of 40-80 (and thus something we already tried fixed it). Think I'm going to unplug (not "turn off") all the electronics downstairs, then head upstairs and do the same, see if I can track the problem down.
Absolutely positive. I can look inside it and see the 3 little blue flames when it's going. I never have used the space heaters, the one that the landlady left for me to use he found before I could and kinda absorbed it, as well as the other one or two he brought with. The electric blanket passed the kill-a-watt test, it wasn't very expensive at all.
Grow lights aren't "grow lights", they're standard shop lights. Here's a shot of them at the old place 2 years ago: http://kita.ath.cx/plants/03.07.09/RackLights4.jpg
The list of things I know for sure have changed:
- Turned on Gas
- Roommates (claim to have) stopped using Space Heaters
- Electric Blanket
- Grow Lights
- Dryer was swapped out
I'm trying to remember when I got the gas turned on, I believe it was at the very start of December, so the space heaters should have been on the $31 (+$20 setup fee) November bill.
I wonder if this is just a case of the meter reader accidentally only saying 300 last month, when it should have been 1300?
For one your roommate sounds shady and if you didn't test it yourself don't believe fuckall he says. And for another space heaters are absolutely going to fuck over your electric bill; you said you weren't home for two weeks, how can you be sure they weren't using them while you were gone?
Unless his dryer is actually OLDER then the one that came with the unit, it's probably better off and should lower your power bill. Unless the builder has all kinds of screwy wiring with the washer/dryer stuff, simply plugging in a new unit should have nothing, if not a positive effect on your power bill. And you have to be a cromagnun man to mess up hooking one of those up. I doubt your room mate screwed it up in any way. It's: plug, screw, shove it back against the wall.
Plus, that wire draws the same voltage once it's connected regardless. So it should make no difference except on the dryer's effectiveness.
I vote for the "flip the master breaker wait, and watch the meter" thing. Once all draws have died, it should stop. If it does not, you can call Idaho Power and they should send out a tech to investigate. Be glad you have a good power company like that, I told my wife about this thread. She said in Virginia (where she went to school), if you had a power issue, the power company you had was one of 4, and they told you to fuck off and pay your bill.
I'll bet he knows exactly what caused it, was doing it while you were gone, and now is trying to foist it off on you.
What a cheap ass, though. Trying to get away from paying an honest share of the bill just because of something that's not proven.
Which tells me that their word is worth about as much as a back of used kitty litter.
I was just thinking that. You said you used 230 in 6 days, which comes out to 1150 in a 30 day period. If your last reading was 1300 instead of 300, you would have used 1300 and 1100 in the previous 2 months, which is consistent.
Having blown all the power to the building and kicked it all back on, things appear to be somewhat slower out there, but we're not timing it or anything, just eyeballing it. Still, in the past 6-7 hours we've used 11 kWh of energy -- so we're en route to a decently high bill, but not $192 high.
Looking at the bill, it's
0-800 kWh @ 0.065262 ($52.21 at max)
801-2000 kWh @ 0.072514 ($87.02 at max)
and
2000+ kWh @ 0.83389 (No Max).
At 40ish kWh per day, we're looking at 33ish * 40 = 1320 kWh, which will be around $52.21 + (520 * 0.072514 = 37.70728)... so about $90+Fees at this rate. That's not unreasonable, as my household and his household were $50 each, and combined, well, $100 doesn't sound impossible.
At my old apartment, with the grow lights, my bill in Jan 09 was $41.06, for 537 kWh. My final bill there, in October, was $57.37, for 695 kWh.
So yeah, 1320 kWh for two households under one roof, not unheard of I guess. Still, there's about 1000 kWh on this bill unaccounted for.
(Which makes me wonder -- what if, say, on the December bill they accidentally wrote down 4956 instead of 5956? That would make each bill about 40 kWh a day...)
Edit: The more I think about it, the more that makes sense. We're currently set to use 40ish kWh a day, the previous bills were for 11.9 and 70.1, average that together and that's 40ish a day. So they must have messed up the reading -- as 11.9 kWh a day is unreasonably low -- and it just caught up to us today.