Life in the new house has been pretty good so far. Our first few utility bills have been pretty sobering though. The gas bill came first, and it was quite a bit higher than we were expecting, especially since it only covered a few days where we actually lived in the house, and most of that time was unseasonably warm so the heat was barely on.<\/p>\n
Our electricity bill came yesterday, and it was even more of a shock. We really weren’t expecting the hydro bill to be too much more than it was in our old place. We have a few more lights, and a few more appliances (dishwasher, clothes washer\/dryer), but other than that all our stuff is the same (computers, lamps, microwave, etc.) and the fridge and stove are pretty similar to our old ones. All the other new things in the house run on gas (water heater, heat). Yet somehow we roughly tripled our electricity consumption. And this was for a 12-day period where we only lived in the house for 4 of them!<\/p>\n
It’s driving me batty trying to figure out what’s eating all the juice. Is it a faulty device somewhere? Does the fan on the otherwise gas-powered furnace really use that much electricity? Is the change from using mostly natural light in the day and having 4-5 incandescents on at night to using 1-2 incandescents during the day (the house doesn’t get as much natural light) and 6-10 at night really use that much more? (A quick calculation says that lights alone, especially since we’re good at turning them off when not in the room, should only be an extra 6 kWh\/day or so; we’re trying to account for a difference of more like 30 kWh\/day). Does a once-weekly run through of the dishwasher and washing machine really bump the daily average up that much? I happened to have a load of dishes to do so I checked: I ran the oven for about 20 minutes, and then the dishwasher plus whatever else in the house was on (a few lights, computers, but no TV or anything) and checked the meter on the side of the house. 3 hours with that consumption ran me 8 kWh, as compared to an average of 15 kWh for the whole day in the apartment…<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, it’s really hard to keep up the morale to conserve when the bill is going to be astronomical no matter what. Why save 30 cents a day by turning off the lights when some mystery device in the house is just going to burn through $1.50 no matter what we do?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Life in the new house has been pretty good so far. Our first few utility bills have been pretty sobering though. The gas bill came first, and it was quite a bit higher than we were expecting, especially since it only covered a few days where we actually lived in the house, and most of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}