How much have you spent on electricity this year?

Berubeland said:

I just bought a new high efficiency washer and dryer which I hooked up downstairs and as soon as I get around to it I will be cutting off the water supply and then the heat.

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Sounds like a good move, although note that there's no such thing as a "high efficiency dryer." Energy Star dryers do not exist: some electric or gas dryers use a bit less energy than others, but none of them are efficient. So the best way to save money in that regard is to use drying racks in winter and clotheslines in summer (or drying racks in summer if you don't or can't use a clothesline). I lived for 30 years without a dryer and managed just fine, although now that I have a dryer I do find it useful in winter, especially for flannel sheets (which take forever to dry on racks) and also because it reduces the need for ironing.

Hard to say what's causing your bill to run high...if you don't have electric heat in the rest of the house, your furnace or boiler might be inefficient; if you have a furnace you also might want to have the ducts cleaned and checked for leaks. If you're really curious I think Hydro can come in and do an energy audit on your home to see if they can figure out where your biggest energy draws are.

Dr_V said:

A typical computer nowadays comes with a 400W power supply, but in practice, the entire system consumes much less during the course of normal operations. A pretty good guess of average power consumption, I think, is around 250W for a typical, modern system. So if you run your computer every day for a month,

(250W/1000) * 24 hours * 30 days = 180 kWh per month

And if you're paying ~6 cents per kWh on average,

180 kWh * 0.06 = $10.80.

I dunno, I wouldn't say that $10.80 amounts to spending "big bucks on electricity" for a computer. You can nearly halve that amount by sleeping your computer for half the day (so you'll save yourself ~$5/mo). The real culprits, as others have mentioned, are things like: (electric) hot tub, dryer, dishwasher, old refrigerators, and so on.

K.

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$10.80 for 1 comp can't be right! I leave my desktop/server on 24/7 and my laptop/tv/ps3/receiver are on about 8 hrs/day

I watch my hydro consumption very closely. Sometimes I'm away for work for 4-8 weeks at a time and I unplug everything, turn off the water heater, and note the meter reading

From April-Oct my bill doesn't swing $20 whether I'm home using the appliances, water heater, computers, lights etc or not!

My YTD ave is $88 including water heater and baseboard heaters. Because of how the payment is calculated, the only thing that really matters is heat. I expect my Ave to go way down this winter now that I'm settled into a routine since I bought the house. (My bills are consistently down from the first summer, and I expect the winter to be better)

I have cfl's, timers, all new appliances and maybe they make enough diff that it doesn't matter whether I'm home or not? $10/month per computer can't be right when my summer bills are around $50/month

Heating my house by baseboard seems to cost about $150/month. I have programmable thermostats and I will add a dehumidifier this year. The baseboards are the only thing I worry about as far as hydro bills go anymore, the rest seems to be negligible

hi:

I always thought we were doing pretty well at about $85/month or 17 kWh/day. We have electric hot water.

We heat with wood so a ceiling fan runs 24/7 for 7 month of the year, plus the ceiling fan in the shop about 4 months. To counterbalance, I cook on the wood stove in the winter, so the daily consumption is farly constant between seasons.

We noticed a big difference when we ejected all the old refrigeration units. A 20 year old freezer or refrigerator will use about 3 kWh/day, a new one about 1. One of our freezers is outside, so uses close to zero these days!

We hang our clothes year round. I can't remember the last time I ran the dryer. In the winter, all that wood stove heat rises to the ceiling of the lofting hallway where we have a retractable clothesline. Clothes are dry in under 6 hours, 4 even.

We keep it dark around here too. Usually running all the time a 20w bulb in the kitchen, a 15 in the TV room and a 15 in the great room near the wood stove. Everything else is switched on the way by.

hboy43

We spend way too much on this; even with natural gas furnace and hot water heater. I'm too depressed about it to even give an actual $ number!

I think it is from TVs and computers running all the time. With 3 kids it is hard to ensure things get turned off when not in use. Our oldest (5) is starting to get it though now and I find that I have to ask him to turn gadget X off when he is done less and less because he thinks about it himself.

We also run the dryer (electric) probably once a day given all the kids; thinking of switching this to NG when it is time to get a new one, but this will likely not be for a while.

I got a Kill-a-watt meter so that I could check the consumption of some of our computers, big computer monitors, TVs and PVRs, etc. It is a very cool tool.

One interesting thing is how much some of our electronics use even when they are 'off'. So we now have a surge protector hooked up to everything in our TV room and we unplug it at the end of each day.

Next thing I want to try with the Kill-a-watt is to see how much it costs to charge rechargable batteries.....