Our electric bill has been running pretty high even though it hasn’t been that cold and we’ve been supplementing with wood heat. Decided to track down the culprit and hooked up an energy usage monitor to one of our 5 sub panels. Gonna check the other 4 over the course of the next few days.
Is someone tapping into your houses supply?
No. We have a big yard so that would be very difficult to do without us noticing.
is the power company even checking the meter?
My parents go solar panels and it didn’t affect their bill at all. Turns out the power company was just charging an average based on previous years, I said find a better provider or start mining bitcoin.
“find a better provider”
Most utilities are regional monopolies, there is no other option.
Some places let you purchase electricity from a seperate broker but you still pay the utility for the lines.
They’ve got solar; expand the power gen a little more and add a battery system.
Disconnecting doesn’t seem so bad in that scenario.
Or monitor power use yourself and compare numbers. You’ll learn interesting things.
I’m in an apartment and found I’m being charged about 1-2% extra because of the voltage drop between the utilities meter on the ground floor, and where I’m monitoring in my unit 5 floors up and on the far side of the building.
For every kwh I measure, I get billed ~1016wh. Had to adjust the voltage reading up a little bit to match.
The power company didn’t choose that. Your parents did, and then forgot to call and switch to a solar-friendly or monthly-usage based rate structure.
I lived in a semi-rural area where they didn’t check the gas meter for months at a time and just kinda guessed each month.
I had that too, after a few months they’d get around to it and it’s get a corrected bill. Really confused me the first time i noticed it.
Yes. Ours uses AMI meters that get read electronically.
A bit curious about the 5 sub panels. Did you just need a lot of separate circuits? Is the main 200A? Good luck getting to the bottom of it.
It has 200 amp service. It’s a pretty unusual setup, all original to the house which was built in the early 70’s. It would probably be prohibitively expensive if you did it the same way now. It was just way overkill to begin with.
That’s what I was thinking, too. 5 subpanels for an average residential home is pretty huge. 2-3 is still okay for a 150-200a service, but 5…that’s a lot of circuits….
One in the carport, one in the workshop, one on each floor of the house - that’s five plus the new panel I’m putting up for the greenhouse, not that many, imho. I just like clean infrastructure and hate core drilling concrete more than necessary.
One on each floor of the house is insane, why do you need breakers everywhere?
If you want to expand your energy monitoring, I highly recommend an Iotawatt
Monitor up to 14 circuits at once, with a nice little web interface hosted on the device. You can view the data there, or have it automatically upload to your own database to be displayed with other tools like grafana (if you’re into selfhosting)
Thanks! This is something I would like to do at some point.
Ooooh, seems to have a Home Assistant integration, too.
How much of your electricity bill is electricity usage though?
I would not be shocked if something like 40% of the bill is fees or connection charges.
Quite a bit. I think we averaged something like 90Kwh per day last month, which is a lot for a 2200 sqft home. My theory is that this place is about as airtight as a block of Swiss cheese and our 19 year old heat pump is struggling to keep up.
Only 40%?
When I lived in a smaller town, my electric bill was 80% of fees and connection charges.
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3.16 kilowatthours
Ie, 1kw of load for 3.16hrs (or 69.3hrs at the 45.6watts shown)
That’s only one hot leg. The other measured about the same. So a little over 6 kwh over a span of about 4.5 hours. That’s mostly from using the range, oven, and a water heater.
I would definately look at the water heater if it’s old. Might have a lot of sediment built up. That and duct leaks and hvac filter. Best to collect a baseline before you make changes though.
Thats a good suggestion. We have two water heaters. This one is 26 years old and is somewhat hard to maintain because of its location. I’ve been dragging my feet on doing anything with it since I’d ultimately like to eliminate it.
This stupid house initially had three water heaters. A. 110 volt little heater that only ran the kitchen sink and the dishwasher. A 55 gallon water heater to run one bathroom and the laundry. And a third 60 or 65 gallon water heater to run two bathrooms and that was it. Isn’t that crazy? I removed the 110 volt water heater and the 60 gallon water heater, and now I need to replace the 55 with a heat pump water heater. This is probably something worth doing. It should consume a lot less electricity and I intend to disable the resistance heater for it. I will get more capacity to help.
That stupid 55 gallon water heater is framed into a wall, which is patently insane.
I wish you luck and I would strongly suspect the water heater is your culprit.
You might also check for hot wster leaks somewhete.
