When people come to our energy company to pay their bills, they often are frustrated and puzzled about why their energy bills are so high. They just can’t seem to find a satisfactory explanation when analyzing their bill. There are many factors or a combination of them that can be the culprit of a high energy bill. In our findings, here are some that seem to come up the most often. It’s a good idea to keep these in mind for next year’s effort to conserve energy and decrease your energy bill.

1. The heater is used more than normal. Usually the main complaint, or should I say the season’s “most noticeable bill,” is after a significant cold spell. With cold weather comes the more frequent use of the heater thereby automatically increasing your bill. For example, December tends to be a cold month so we heat up our homes, and the gas usage goes up.  Come January when the December bill arrives, customers tend to get “sticker shock” when they see their first bill of the cold season. In addition, add holiday lights for house and/or tree decorations, visiting family or friends from out of town (more hot water usage for showers and laundry), and increased usage of electricity or gas for cooking all the family meals and festivities and you’ve just racked up a pretty good sized energy bill.  For the next Holiday season, try replacing your holiday lights with some LED Christmas lights…they are known to be energy efficient and are on sale now!  

2. The thermostat is left unchanged.  Another culprit can be the simple oversight of not “turning down” the thermostat’s temperature low enough during the night instead of turning the thermostat completely OFF. If your heater cycles on while you are sleeping then your heating bill is bound to increase.  So then you have to remember to turn off the heater at night before going to bed then get up in the cold morning and turn it on again, jump back into your warm bed until the house is heated up again before starting your morning rituals. What a pain!

To resolve this inconvenience I found that Programmable thermostats are the way to go. In fact, for a limted time PG&E is offering FREE Programmable thermostats–all you have to do is enroll in the Smart AC program – check out the requirements to qualify.  Programming the thermostat to go off at bedtime with a temperature setting of 55F degrees (or lower) during the night will prevent the heater from having to cycle on at night. Next, program the thermostat to kick on 20-30 minutes before you wake up in the morning, just long enough to warm up the house. The use of a programmable thermostat is very efficient and takes the worry out of having to always fiddle with the temperature setting to its most efficient setting. They can be purchased from any hardware store usually starting in price from $25-$30 and up. It’s an inexpensive, smart, long term investment.  NOTE:  A good rule of thumb is that if you are going to be gone from your home for 4 hours or longer, then turn off your heater altogether.

3. A portable electric space heater is used One of the biggest culprits is the myth that it is cheaper to use a portable electric space heater (PESH) instead of your central gas furnace to heat your home. This is one of THEE biggest myths because using a PESH is generally not an efficient user of electricity nor is it cost effective. PESHs are notorious for hiking up one’s electric bill in no time. They use a lot of electricity to run and customer’s fall victim into the thinking that because the cost to purchase a PESH is not very much ($20-$50 and up) that it therefore must not be expensive to operate/run. However, those little energy hogs use A LOT of juice and hike up the electricity bill faster than you can bat an eye.  In general, it is better to use your gas furnace to heat the house instead. The exception would be if you don’t require heating up the entire home and only need to heat one room where the majority of time is spent. Still it can be costly to heat up that one room with that little PESH. Furthermore, keep in mind that letting the space heater run all night is very costly.  Make sure to do thorough research before purchasing a PESH if you must buy one.

In conclusion, you should always take these 3 factors into consideration to better understand your energy bill if it seems unusually high. These are the most common culprits reported to us or identified by our office. Let me know if you’ve run into other ones.