I opened the electric bill standing at the mailbox in 96-degree heat, with sweat running down my back, and read the total twice. $198. Our highest summer bill since we moved into the duplex.
Our side of the duplex is all-electric. The heat pump does the heating and the cooling, and the water heater and the stove are electric too. I budget $135 a month for electricity on average, and summer usually runs around $190, so $198 wasn't a shock exactly. But that bill covered the last stretch of June, the heat pump had barely shut off in weeks, and I knew July was going to be worse.
In Missouri you don't get to shop around for who sells you electricity. There's one utility for our street and that's that. So there's no switching to a cheaper supplier. The only thing we can change is how much we use.
Reading the bill like a prescription label
The dollar amount doesn't tell you much by itself, because the weather changes every month. The number that matters is kilowatt-hours. That bill was 1,402 of them. With all the charges added up, we pay about 13 and a half cents for each one in the summer, plus a $9 customer charge we'd pay no matter what.
So every 100 kilowatt-hours we don't use is about $13.50. That made the fixes easy to think about.
What we changed
We did all of this in the first two weeks of July, mostly on my days off:
- Blinds. The living room window faces west and cooks the room every afternoon. We put up two insulated blinds from Walmart, $34 for both, and I close them by noon.
- A fan. A $32 pedestal fan for the living room, and the ceiling fan in the bedroom, which we'd honestly never turned on. With air moving, 76 feels like 74.
- The thermostat schedule. The heat pump came with a programmable thermostat in 2016, and nobody had ever set a schedule on it. It sat at 72 all day. Now it's 76 when we're home, 79 while we're both at work and 75 at night. We don't go higher than 79 because Moose stays home, and a big hound in a hot duplex is a sad sight.
- Weatherstripping. You could see daylight under the back door. We put $12 of foam weatherstrip around the frame, and Mr. Dale bought and installed a new door sweep. He's fair but he's cheap, so I was surprised he paid for it. It took him eight days to get over here, but he paid.
- The water heater. With Mr. Dale's okay, Tyler turned it down from 140 to 120 degrees. Neither of us has noticed a difference in the shower.
We also quit using the oven on hot days. It's been the slow cooker, the grill out in the carport and a lot of sandwiches. Heating up the kitchen and then paying the heat pump to cool it back down is paying twice.
Out of our pocket, all of that came to $78: $34 for the blinds, $32 for the fan and $12 for weatherstripping.
The August bill
I write bills on the fridge calendar by the month they're due, so to me this is the August bill, even though it showed up on Thursday. It covers late June through most of July, the hottest stretch of the year so far, and only about two weeks of it had all our fixes in place.
It was $175. That's 1,232 kilowatt-hours, 170 fewer than the month before, in hotter weather. About $23 less.
If we save $20 or more a month for the rest of the summer, the $78 pays for itself by October. And the blinds and the weatherstripping keep working when the heat pump switches over to heating this winter.
What we didn't do
Our electric utility has an average-billing plan, where they take your last year of bills and charge you the same amount every month. We looked at it. It doesn't lower what you pay over a year. It just smooths out the bumps. For now I want to see the real number every month so I can tell whether what we're doing is working. Ask me again in January.
