Higher and Higher bills!
Are your Electric and Gas bills higher even after being Energy Smart and using less Kilowatts and Therms than before?
Well, you are not alone. There was a time when you implemented smart energy saving steps and your electric, oil, and gas bills would go down. Today it has almost come to the best you can hope for, after taking smart energy saving steps, is that your utility bill remains the same!
Why? Because utilities continuously raise their rates and saving energy has to be done just to prevent your energy cost from blowing through your roof!
Case and point:
A family moves into a small two bedroom ranch in 1997. The house is located by one of America's highest charging electric utility in the country. The previous couple in the house paid about $100.00 a month for electric and use about 1,000 gallons of oil per year. Two years and several energy saving steps later, oil consumption was down to 320 gallons per year and $46.00 a month for electric. Now lets take a closer look at the electric bill. Over the years the electric bill continuously went up despite Kilowatt consumption remaining the same. Then in 2003, 2005, and 2008 more energy saving steps lowered the Kilowatt consumption each year, but the electric bill rate increases wiped out additional savings. At least, the family saved by preventing the electric bill from being even higher.
Electric bill in July of 2003 consumed 578 Kilowatts and had a cost of $91.68
Electric bill in June of 2005 consumed 10 Kilowatts less at 568, but the cost had gone up to $96.80
Electric bill in March of 2008 consumed even less Kilowatts at 554, but the cost had gone up even higher to $106.71!
The gas bill in March of 2003 consumed 29 Therms* at a cost of $48.25
The gas bill in March of 2008 consumed 29 Therms at a cost of $68.21
*(Therms is a unit of heat and a form of measuring the amount of gas consumed, like Kilowatts are for electricity)
Oil consumption has gone down from 320 to 275 gallons per year and you can imagine how much that bill has gone up.
