So, um....

[conuly]

What's your electric bill look like in the summer and winter, everybody? I'm trying to get a better feel for what's "normal". (If you live off-the-grid in the woods, disclose that upfront, thanks.)

Comments

[alessandriana]

Usually around $60-80. The last two months it's been around $100; not sure why, haven't had the energy to investigate.

[conuly]

Running the a/c more?

[sonia]

$60/month all winter when I'm running the electric heat in my massage studio, and also most of the summer when I'm running the dehumidifier down there. If I run neither for most of a month, it's closer to $40. No air conditioning, and the main furnace is gas.

[kengr]

Mine is $60-$70 most of the year. But now that I have an air conditioner it's gonna be $100 or more until september.

[nicki]

200ish in the summer less than 100 in the winter (California and PG&E)

[darkoshi]

So many variables there. Size of dwelling, # of people, local climate, thermostat settings, Heater/A/C efficiency, insulation/weather-tightness, etc.

For me, it has varied a lot over the years, depending on how many people were living here and how much the A/C was being used during the daytime. You're asking about electric+gas, right? Or only the electric part?

My highest monthly bills are around $240, always in January or February which are the coldest months. The cheapest bills are $85 to $90, usually in the Spring or Fall. Last month (thru mid-July) was $132.
Those all include a $15 charge for having a streetlight right outside my gate which points towards my yard; else they'd be $15 less.

Q's highest bill was $329 this last January. His lowest bills are ~$100. They are higher than mine as he keeps his A/C set colder than I do, plus he is at home more than I am. We live in SC.

This is what all my charges look like, broken down on my latest bill (the # of kWh and Therms used each month varies; the charge per kWh & per Therm varies a bit month to month, but the other charges remain the same).

Basic Facilities Charge 10.00
642 kWh X $ 0.136520 87.65
Renewable Energy Resources 1.00
Overhead Pvt St Lights 15.41
Subdivision Lighting 2.18
Total Electric Charges $116.24

Basic Facilities Charge 10.90
Base - 4 Therms X $ 1.181250 4.73
Total Gas Charges $15.63

[jesuswasbatman]

You get charged for having a street light outside your house? Is that normal in the USA?

[darkoshi]

Only because it is pointed in towards the yard instead of out to the street, even though a lot of the light illuminates the street too.

Whoever lived here before me must have had them put up the light pole like that. I tried asking if the electric company would reposition the light at the top of the pole towards the street so that I wouldn't have to pay the extra money, but it sounded like they would only turn it off, not reposition it. Then the street by my house would be completely dark and more dangerous. So I decided to just leave it and keep paying the fee.

There are other normal streetlights around (I take it that's what the "subdivision lighting fee" is for), but it can get pretty dark in some areas which aren't right next to one.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

There is no normal in the USA as street lights are Very Local-the normal in one part of a town can be very different than others.

My grandma had to pay to have a light put on the power pole, possibly as the only way to either keep people from siphoning power in her backyard, or keep them from breaking her plants while they siphoned power.

[marahmarie]

Totes normal! Unlike darkoshi we rent but the landlord pays our utility co-op for the streetlight, which... *reads her reply* does face our apartment, though at a 90 degree angle (and I'm not really sure why the landlord picks the cost up instead of us, but when I lived with an ex-SO of mine downstate from here who owned his own house, he was charged for his - which faced his house at about the same angle - maybe that cost is simply not passed on to renters).

[conuly]

I've never ever heard of something like this, and it's getting the same o.0 face I gave when I heard that some people pay for trash pickup instead of having it covered by the city.

[darkoshi]

My trash pickup fee is included in the yearly property tax bill and costs $249. Water and sewer are billed separately.

The city has to pay for the trash pickup one way or another, so including it in the property taxes makes sense to me. For people who rent, they may not see a bill for it, but it surely figures into the rent amount.

I glad you asked the question for this post; reading the replies is fascinating even though it makes me curious for a lot more details (how far north or south does everyone live; how do they heat and cool their house; do they have a gas bill separate from the charges they listed, or do they use a fireplace; how many kWh are used per month, etc).

[marahmarie]

I'm glad , too, as I learned our bills are also pretty high. I have the same questions you do about what contributes to other people's bills, including square footage, amount of people/high energy using pets in household, insulation levels, energy efficiency of appliances, presence or lack of HVAC or window a/c heating/cooling, structural integrity of household structures ie are windows/doors well-sealed, and so on. It might make excellent formal poll material, though the amount of questions one could cram is almost endless!

[marahmarie]

I'd have to check if we pay for trash pickup. We don't get bills mailed (we're on the Eco save paper thing where I just access them online) and because nothing is printed out I don't have a way to just grab the bill and remind myself what we're getting charged for. When I pay each month I just click the Pay Now button and ignore the breakdown of charges because the costs are so insane my stomach turns and I really don't want to know nor remind myself just how bad it is.

But I have a post planned for my DW where I do just that - open a bill in PDF and break it all down, both for other's edification and to remind myself what all we pay for to begin with - it's a lot.

[nightdog_barks]

We're on the far northern edge of the DFW sprawl metroplex, and it's just the two of us and the dog in a house that's a smidge over 2000 square feet. Here's our most recent electric bills:

December 2017: $56.00
January 2018: $25.00
February 2018: $61.00

June 2018: $79.00
July 2018: $142.00
August 2018: $175.00

We have central a/c, and our electric company is a regional co-op. Also we had a pretty mild winter, but this summer has been nasty.

Oops, meant to add we keep our thermostat in the summer set to 79. (I get cold easily these days because my internal thermostat seems to be permanently out of whack.)

[mindstalk]

My old 2BR in Cambridge was around $15 most months, unless the A/C was running, which case as high as $73, though 40-50 was more common.

Power draws were the fridge, a laptop, CFL bulbs, and a 300 W halogen torchiere I used in low power mode most of the time, which also seemed to extend its lifetime by quite a lot (in addition to not using it all that much.)

The current apartment, with 3 people, is a lot more -- $87 in the lowest month, $250 in the highest, and that's before I got an A/C. I'm not sure why. I suspect more expensive bulbs, run more often; maybe someone has a desktop computer. Also I had to use a space heater for a good part of the winter. Oh, and I guess they have a couple A/Cs installed, one of them a really old one built into the wall.

[ratcreature]

I pay about €30/month and use a bit over 80kWh/month, which is according to my utility about half of the average one person household here. My bill is yearly so I don't know how it changes seasonally, but I have no a/c and no electric heaters.

[loligo]

We're a family of four in a four bedroom house with poorly-designed HVAC ductwork. In July and August our electric runs around $200 (which is why we're in the middle of getting geothermal installed, and re-doing the ducts).

In non-AC seasons it's under $100 -- not sure of exact amount, because we get billed for gas and electric together and I don't have an older bill on hand.

[8hyenas]

$80ish during hot months (June-Sept, in Oklahoma)
$40ish during the rest with a slight uptick if I break down and use space heaters instead of the wood stove.

Disclosing: Small house with no dryer, tv, dishwasher, a halfsize fridge etc. but with how rural we are the kw price of electric is very high.

I honestly don't think I'd have electric at all if it wasn't so absolutely necessary for running an air conditioner three months out of the year.

[jo]

The province of Ontario apparently has among the highest electricity rates in North America (or so our MPPs keep repeating in the Legislature). My first experience with hydro bills in Toronto was with our previous apartment (the previous 3 apartments we didn't pay for electricity) -- the one with the batshit crazy landlady. We rarely had a monthly hydro bill below $200, and that was during the few weeks of the year that required no heating or air con. We had a few that were near or slightly over $400. I think something may have been off with the meter for that unit, because the people in the other unit never seemed to have bills that high. For our current apartment, it's much lower. Heat is included in the rent so the only increase occurs in the summer, due to air conditioning. The non-summer average is about $70, and it's about $100 with the air con units and fans going in the summer. That's with Jon being home almost all the time, with his massive computer set-up (including 4 monitors) which he leaves on 24/7, a dishwasher (which we run 1-2 times a week), and me watching lots of TV in the evening and on weekends. The previous apartment had a washer and dryer (no dishwasher), but I never used the dryer because it was a major energy-sucker.

[thornsilver]

My last month bill was about $160. I live in Queens in a one bedroom, and I work, which means that I use about 60 hours less of air conditioner a week than someone who would be home.

[isis]

$23/month round the year. We bought into a community solar garden which offsets 100% of our usage (and we sell back the excess through net metering, $62 last year) so we just pay the base charge plus tax. (Actual usage cost is about $80 in the summer and $95 in the winter.)

1600 sf house built in 1928, but we installed high-quality windows and insulated it. Gas heat, window a/c in the bedroom for summers, lots of computer equipment as we both work at home.

[larryhammer]

This is complicated -- we recently installed a completely new cooling system and don't yet have enough data points to know what we should be expecting. Going by before that, typical for our 1953 3BR house in southern Arizona was

summer: $250/mo
winter: $25/mo

[zhelana]

$50 in winter $125 in summer?

[jennaria]

I agree with previous commenters that it heavily depends on where you're living, how big your space is, and how many people occupy it. For one more data-point: ~1000 square foot apartment in Georgia, two people, highs near $90, lows near $40. Power is via Georgia Power. Both our heating and our cooling are electric-based.

[kareina]

That is a great question, I hadn't really looked. I was about 2000 SEK a month in the winter, and 1300 SEK a month in the summer, but this spring we switched electric companies, and now this summer we are paying more like 600 SEK a month. It will be interesting to see how that changes in the winter. Note that, in theory, we aren't spending so much electricity on the heating as we have "bergvärme" (or "down hole heat exchange" in English), but it does require some power to operate.

This is for a small house with a full basement, and a computer server in said basement.

Note that once converted to US $ my numbers are considerably higher than most of the people commenting have been mentioning.

[pwcorgigirl]

We live in southern Tennessee, where it's been hotter than Vulcan's anvil this summer. Winter cost is around $70 a month because our house (three bedrooms) is largely heated with natural gas. Summer creeps up as the temperature increases and the central air conditioning is used more. It generally tops out at $240 in the month with the hottest weather.

We did join the electric company's stakeholder plan to build a solar electric "farm" and should eventually start seeing lower electric bills.

[duskpeterson]

Our winter bills have always been frighteningly high, as bad as $400. We used to live in a 3000-square-foot house, and now we live in a 1200-square-foot loft with ten-foot ceilings.

Summer bills are around $60; we keep the thermostat at 80 degrees in the summer. Over the entire year, last year's bills averaged $160 a month. There are two us living here, and electricity and heat are combined. We live in Maryland: hot summers, cold winters, and pleasant springs and falls.

[silveradept]

My municipal power monopoly charges me, on the "make it all a uniform payment all year" plan, for a small garbage can, water, sewer, "surface water", and electricity, about $270 USD / month. That's in a multiple-computers and technologies house with heat and some of the appliances powered by natural gas, handled by the regional electric and gas monopoly, which adds approximately $10 USD / month in the summer months and about $100 USD / month in the winter, with a thermostat for heating set to 65-67 when the house is occupied and 62 when it is not.

[malinaldarose]

Mine runs about $40 a month in the summer and about $60 a month in the winter. I heat with natural gas, but the furnace's fan motor is electric.

[spikethemuffin]

Around $35 in winter and $75 in summer for 388 sq ft first floor apartment in the shade. When I was being super-extra careful and did not have an at-home Internet connection (and went to work for ten hours a day, minimum), I managed my fridge well (large stocks of just-in-case water with space for airflow and a good seal) and the weather was temperate, it would average $11, lowest being $3.33 (not sure how that happened). Of course, now I pay for two houses, one of which is an A/C addict (they were proud to have turned the thermostat UP to 72, even when no-one is home), and that's around $150.

[adafrog]

I live in a 2200sf house in the Texas Panhandle. I think I just paid $120 on electric. And I have gas for heat and water heater.

[the_siobhan]

I checked and we average just under $150 a month. That's for a 2-story house with 3 people living in it. We don't have air conditioning, but we run fans like mad, have three computers and two tvs and at least three of those five are going at all times. We also have a heat lamp for the lizard when it's not 40+ degrees in here. And we run 3-6 loads of laundry a week.

Heating, stove and hot water are all gas so that doesn't include heating.

[lassarina]

Mine is $80 or so winter, $120-150 summer. Chicago, air-conditioned, heat is gas. Two humans, lotta eletronics, split level house with poor circulation.

[zyzyly]

About $60 in the winter, and about $150 or so in summer--I live in an area where we use the air conditioning a lot in summer.

[magnetic_pole]

So interesting to see what folks pay for what climates and what size houses.

Just to add my two cents: 900 sf apartment on the top floor of a very well-insulated 1930s apartment building in Washington DC. $20 to $30 in winter (we don't even need to turn on the heat) and about $40 to $50 in the summer (with constant AC, due to that well-insulated building). We've got a heat pump.

Sorry to hear from your recent post that you're overpaying. I hope it's something that can be worked out without too much trouble. M.

[marahmarie]

*eyes post date* Oh good, I'm still not late...

Mine are probably not normal (the Singer HVAC system this place has for heat and air was built in 1980...I googled, it's so old - and is kept together with little more than screws (some missing) and spit). The fridge is also on the outs (there's a leak coming from behind the light bulb that we've attempted to fix on our own twice, flooding the fridge out every day, and a landlord who ignores my complaints about it). Fridge is probably circa 1990s at best.

Also, Other Person runs the a/c more than I like, keeps it colder than I like, and runs the heat more than I would in winter, since I'm all for practically freezing to death before switching it on. We're also paying into a city co-op, not a regular utility, so trash, sewer, fire and water are included in these estimates (so probably not normal, like I said, assuming ConEd or similar covers your area).

Edit: reading through other's comments after adding mine, I should also do some background: we're in an apartment of around 800 square feet with no insulation in the ceiling upstairs, which makes the upstairs way too hot with sun beating down on it all day/into evening, and we have our own (very old) washer/dryer and an antique dishwasher that somehow still works that we run anywhere from 0-3 times a month, because we cook a lot and and the sheer endless amount of dishes/pots/pans can get overwhelming. /edit

That said, the lowest bills we'll have are in late fall and early spring when I can convince OP to shut off forced heat or air - around $140-$175. Winter range: $275-$300. Summer: $200-275, but with the brutal heat this year, much closer to $275 more recently.

Duke Energy was waaaaaay cheaper. I hated them ("Yes, the power's out again - another squirrel on the line, most probably") but they were dirt cheap compared to paying for everything (as the property had its own well and trash/fire/other was paid for through property taxes).

[conuly]

I always want to throw sweaters at people in the winter.

[marahmarie]

My first words to probably everyone I've ever lived with when they reach for the thermostat when I'm not yet a total walking iceberg: "Uh, cant you put on a sweater/add a blanket/bundle up a little more, or something?" I'm actually extremely sensitive to cold (more so than I gather most people are; I get chilled on the regular in summer under a/c conditions whereas most normal people just don't) so I figure if I can take the cold by bundling up or adding blankets, or doing whatever, then hey, so can they.

[delphi]

I'm not off the grid in the woods, but I do have a bachelor apartment, which I recognize takes a lot less electricity than a house.

I average about $28 CDN in the summer and $21 CDN in the winter. If I was allowed to have an air conditioner, I would happily be spending a little more in the summer.

[topaz_eyes]

Am I too late?

A house of 4 people, 1050 sq ft, in a city of 65,000 in the middle of the prairies. The last 7 months, our electricity portion of utilities ranged from $90-$118 CAD (about $70-90 USD). Our computers run 24/7 though. We use A/C only 5-7 days of the year when the outside temp climbs above 35 C. Heat is gas. The city owns and operates the utilities.

[gatheringrivers]

We have computers (yes, multiple) and several appliances that are in an "always on" state.

We also have....erm.... "co-op" type power situation where we live now. Small community partnership setup.

So currently, it's roughly USD $100 or less in the summer, and HAS been as much as USD $500 in the winter. I'm curious to see how this winter will be, since we got our dire frightening almost-burn-the-house-down electric fixed, and the HVAC system repaired.

Last place, on a "budget plan" (average all 12 months, and bill accordingly) was about $400 a month, with VASTLY more inefficient HVAC (because the house was older and had more airgaps.) Last place was also a "proper" utility, known for having obnoxious rates and couldn't really do anything about it.

IF you're using incandescent bulbs and NOT a lot of computers and appliances always-on (because we're geeks, and that's kind of an outlier situation in our age group), then swap to LED's and you'll see a pretty nice sized drop.

(Edit: Both places are houses)

[randomdreams]

Since darkoshi wants more details: average 350-400kWh/month @$0.07-ish/kWh, for about $40. No AC. We're in Denver in a 2000 square foot house with really excellent windows downstairs and only okay ones upstairs.
All our lights are either led or fluorescent, and as the f's die I'm replacing them with led. Because it's nearly a desert, we use the clothes dryer about once a month, so our main load is the oven.

[marahmarie]

2000 sq at $40 a month is mad impressive. (All our windows suck and one door, one window and one patio door aren't set right/aren't even sealing all the way, with sun shining through gaps in all three.)

[randomdreams]

Not as much as you'd think: heating is by gas, which is more. The comment about the windows was to explain why we don't have/need AC, which would be the biggest electricity usage during the summer.

[cellio]

January: $60.
July: $140.

4BR house (plus some partially finished space above & below that we rarely use) in the US midwest, gas heat (radiators, so there's an electric pump I guess), AC on the second floor, whole-house dehumidifier, gas water heater. Winter thermostat settings are 62-70, summer 74-78. Furnace, AC, fridge, and most kitchen appliances are relatively recent -- about 12 years for the furnace and AC, newer for the rest. We have a few computers that are always on, but I don't think they're energy hogs (Mac Mini, iMac, Tivo).