My PGE bill is a little over 50c per kilowatt hour. Its starting to become like a second mortgage or car payment for some. Wondering what other people are paying for their power.
https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf
15¢/kWh. Makes driving an EV really economical. I did a day trip last week and had to charge at a DC fast charge and it was 56¢/kWh. At that price it would’ve been cheaper to drive my wife’s Traverse. For reference the break even for me at $3/gal is 40¢/kWh (3.5 mi/kWh). eMPG is a joke. The real measurement is miles/dollar.
EV driving really shines in local trips, which is the majority of most people’s driving. My husband and I have solar panels and a plug in hybrid, so his commute to work every day is essentially free for us (aside from wear and tear). If you’re regularly driving long hauls then fully EV doesn’t seem to make sense yet, but for every day driving, the trade off of having cheaper daily trips with occasional higher expenses for long hauls probably still nets a lower cost per mile.
When I first got my EV, the DC fast charge rates weren’t that high. I was seeing an average around 35 cents/kWh. A near 50% jump in price now has me planning trips in advance not for just charging stops but a cost analysis in case it’s cheaper with gas (fuck Illinois electricity rates). The plan is still to get my wife an EV when it’s time to replace the Traverse. I hope that DC rates won’t be so bad for long trips by then so I don’t have to hear about it. She’s still unconvinced despite our summer vacation being done with entirely level 2 chargers on the way down and at our destination, then 1 DC charge to get back home.
Dynamic pricing contract. Planning when to charge the car, running dishwasher etc is small effort.
Adding 5KW solar panels and a change of contract, from >€500 to something like €75. Family of 4, pretty heavy usage.
I live in Washington state, most of my electricity is from hydro or nuclear. My bill is usually about $80 a month, but it can go over $100 in the summer if I’m running the AC a lot.
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:
- 210 kwh for EV charging. I don’t drive a ton and can also charge at work sometimes. This is 27% of our total
- 130 kwh for AC. We live in SE MI, so it’s not hot. We keep our AC set to 75 when it’s on. These two combined are now 40% of our bill
- 62 kwh for my work desk (hybrid work) and deep freeze
- 61 kwh for our furnace blower motor. This one surprised me. We were leaving it on the low setting to equalize temperature. On the low speed it pulls 500 watts, or 12 kwh/day. It obviously pulls more power when the AC is on
- 61 kwh for our fridge
- 28 kwh for our washing machine and gas dryer
- now we’re in odds and ends territory. 17 kwh for our instant Hot water (tea), 12 kwh for our sump pump and dehumidifier, 11 for our dishwasher, 8 for the TV (old fluorescent)/garage/ps5/modem/route, 7 for the microwave
- another 100 or so that doesn’t have a clamp on the breaker
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.
100-250 per month
Spot on for me in the Midwest. My range and AC are electric, heating is a boiler. So it’s super cheap in Winter and rough in Summer.
Average 0.16 USD per kwh if I divide the whole bill by the KWH.
Our bill is pretty high but literally everything runs on electricity in the house, the cooking, water heating, A/C, we have clothes washer & dryer, there is no gas line.
The rate around here is now down to $0.22/kWh. We were occasionally getting electricity bills around $400/month at worst, but we haven’t had an electrical bill since April of this year with our solar panels on the roof now.
Can’t remember the exact price per kwh, but I pay around $120/month in the summer and about $75-100/month in the winter. The winter varies so much based on how many heat lamps I have to provide for my ducks and how many heated water bowls they use. Last winter I had two lamps set up for a while then went back down to one. They used two heated bowls a day, but I have new birds this year, so they may use more.
This is all in Pennsylvania, btw
I’m also PGE and it’s the same, about $0.50 per kWhr. I don’t even have AC, but I’m typically paying $150-$250 per month.
My AC was set at 84 and I still got a 400+ bill. Its insane. I thought at first my AC was having issues, but the guy came out and its only pulling around 3kw and its definitely working. Found out im using around the same KWH as last year (actually a bit less) but the rate hikes means we see more peaks and much higher bills.
I’d let you know how much I spend in electricity through PGE, but…
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I just recently moved in, so I don’t have good data for you yet, and
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Portland General Electric ≠ Pacific Gas & Electric
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.1673 and .1809 peak here in Michigan.
$0.50 per kWh is absurd. Where we are, the power company charges $0.1065 on peak and $0.1001 off. (As in, about a dime.)
Note that this is still about 33% more than at the start of the pandemic. We were around $0.07 per kWh prior to 2021.
about 150 per month for the whole family
Hot damn, I’m in the UK I’m paying what converts to $265 to power and heat a 2 bed bungalow.
Between 14.7 and 15.4c / kwh. Gexa in Texas. My last bill was $285. We have a gas stove, water heater, furnace, and dryer. Our gas bill is about $50/mo. The lowest our electricity goes is about $90 in the winter.
Summer rates are about $0.13/kwh. My EV charger is on off peak plan that costs $0.06/kwh.
