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A $400 bill at $0.50 per kwh is 800 kwh. Our electricity usage in the month of August was 787 kwh. I wired an energy meter into my circuit panel a month ago, so I can break that down:
If you don't have an EV and you're really keeping your AC at 84 I strongly suspect you have a failing appliance. Unless you live in Phoenix and have a massive and very poorly insulated house or something.
During covid (I was doing remote work, so basically no EV charging), our old dishwasher finally stopped working with a dryer heater error code. When we replaced it our electric bill fell by a double digit percentage (I want to say 20%+) year over year.
As for things like insulation, going from 3" of 1969 insulation to a massive quantity of blown in helped our winter heating bill (gas) a lot more than our summer AC bill.
Good luck!
Thanks! Phoenix is close to our weather, although this week is not a good example thank God. Its regularly over 110 most days of the summer. I have one of the watt meters + a raspberry pi that monitors our watts in real time and can tell what appliances take up the most power. The vast majority of the bill is the AC. In winter, we sip power. Our gas is actually more then.
I'm currently pulling 218 watts right now (fridge/2 laptops/small server/two pis/2 meshtastic devices/one light/ and a host of zombie power devices) and will pull a little over 3kw when the AC is on. And with the tier based system that PGE has, it means months where you do actually use the ac, they jack up the price at the worst possible times. Its closer to 60c per kilowatt hour before fees. And its going up again this year for the 4rth time...
If the biggest portion of your bill is AC and you live in a hot area the only things I could think of are planting some trees if they'll grow and using a programmable thermostat to shift your usage away from off peek as best you can.
Yep that's an excellent idea.
There's also solar ac's that have started to catch on. I'm taking a look but they seem too new so I'm waiting a bit.