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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.
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.
Some places let you purchase electricity from a seperate broker but you still pay the utility for the lines.
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.
That is…wild. I’m in a pretty rural area and we had meter readers till they got to smart meters.
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.
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….
Four here, definitely not huge.
Sometimes it’s just history
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?
Every room has two circuits for the outlets and one for the lights so a fault can be fixed with some light and powertools available and so that every room still has power when a single phase goes out. The kitchen alone has about ten circuits, freezer, dish washer, oven, microwave, kettle each one of their own, induction stove three because 3 phase power and a few for the normal outlets. I just want to be able to run everything at the same time e.g. when making breakfast. It adds up that way.
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.
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.
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.