what on earth does electricity cost near you?

[jaotguy]

my HYDRO ONE bill for last month was $ 653.00 ...

 

[3930dave]

holy crap
your highest part of the bill are taxes and delivery charges. that sucks.

When you start adding that up (and, if your blood pressure can handle it, consider future escalations....), true off-grid start looking better and better - at least for the folks that only count beans to make decisions.....

Having your manufacturing base destroyed is bad enough. Having it destroyed, then having to pay somebody else to take the electricity those factories don't use anymore...... I better get off this topic before chest pains kick in...... :ill:

Rgds, D.

 

[grsthegreat]

I looked at my electric bill for last month. This was a month where the house was pimped out for XMAS and i have 5 water 250 watt tank heaters running and the wifes greenhouse heater. I also have extra electric heat in tackroom and basement baseboard heat for guest.

we actually used 3,240 KWH of electricity last month....a new record for us. Between the record cold here and guests , holidays,etc, we just helped warm up the planet.

Our bill was $210.54.

thats like 2x what it usually is this time of the year.

that comes out to about $0.06/KWH

but i put a kebash to all that waste earlier this month.

 

[Looking4new]

my HYDRO ONE bill for last month was $ 653.00 ...

WOW that hurts! Don't tell my D-I-L, she will have all the lights on all day.

I'm in the process of changing all the lights here to LED's. I swapped out the 4 100 watt floods for the yard and stuck in LED's there as well. They only suck about 18 watts of juice and put out 900 Lumens of light.
I've just got the basement left to do. It is not cheap, but the lights are supposed to last for 50,000 hours and at my age they will outlive me.

 

[jaotguy]

already switched to compact flour and energy efficient appliances ... its the electric baseboards ... finally got nat gas on the street.. going to connect this summer ( if I'm not broke from the bills ).

 

[Looking4new]

IF you go with Nat. gas....Do NOT get the high efficiency unit. Go with the mid efficiency, you will be warmer.

CFL's contain mercury and I heard that they have a tendency to cause fires when they screw up. That is why I now have a cupboard full of them and am going with the LEDs.

I've got two woodstoves and a mid efficiency oil furnace that is 20 years old and still working at 86% as of last year when it was serviced and it burns diesel. It gets serviced every year whether it needs it or not. I had a friend who switched from oil to nat. gas and was talked into a high efficiency gas furnace. Her house was always cold after that.

 

[KTurner]

already switched to compact flour and energy efficient appliances ... its the electric baseboards ... finally got nat gas on the street.. going to connect this summer ( if I'm not broke from the bills ).

I've got two woodstoves and a mid efficiency oil furnace that is 20 years old and still working at 86% as of last year when it was serviced and it burns diesel. It gets serviced every year whether it needs it or not.

An elderly family member that lives in a ~1400sqft house next door has been using an oil furnace, to the tune of about $3,000 per heating season. The heating season is not real long here in southeast VA, so that works out to say $700 a month during the heating season. This year she asked me what I thought about using the old baseboard heaters instead of the oil furnace. I checked em and they worked, so we decided to leave the furnace off (and disable automatic oil delivery) and see what the baseboard heaters could do. Her monthly electric bills, so far, have been about $150-$200 more than last years bill, so she's saving in the neighborhood of $500/month by using electric baseboard heat instead of the oil furnace. The oil furnace did get serviced annually. Only thing I can figure is that
a) oil has gotten real expensive, over $4 per gallon (I can get diesel cheaper, and that includes the road tax). electricity is about $.11/kwh
b) Right before heating season started, I noticed a leak in her ductwork in the attic, but it doesn't seem to cause big issues for the A/C. Probably been leaking for a long time.
c) each rooms baseboard heat is controlled by its own thermostat and she tends to turn up the room she's in at the time.
d) every bit of produced heat goes directly into the living area. No heating up the garage where the furnace is or heat loss due to ductwork running outside of living area.

This all surprised me as I had always heard oil was the way to go, unless you could use a heat pump.

Keith

 

[BitChin1]

Here is a comparison tool for various fuels used to heat our homes
Fuel Comparison Calculator for Home Heating

 

[3930dave]

Perhaps cheap in this part of Spain ?

BBC - Future - Science & Environment - Salty solution to storing solar

Wouldn't want to maintain those mirrors here, with our snow/ice cycles, but would be applicable for the USA SouthWest, Oz, or a similar geography.

One thing I found interesting..... that project is funded out of the UAE.

Rgds, D.

 

[dfkrug]

Here is a rough idea of costs by province in Canada.

Wow, who woulda guessed that here in California we pay more than most Canadians. :thumbdown:
(Condolences to our TBN friends in Australia and Norway.)

I use 15-17 KWh/day year-round. We have 4 Tiers of rates, which cut in at lower
usage totals in the summer. In the winter, I usually stay in the Tier 1 rate group (19.3 KWh/day),
which is 13.2 cents/KWh. But I use less electricity than most folks here. Tier 3 (30c) in the
winter cuts in at 25 KWh/day, and Tier 4 cuts in at only 38 KWh/day. Tier 4 is a whopping
$34c/KWh! Most folks hit that Tier year-round, and we sometimes get up there in the summer.
And we don't even have A/C.