Ok, I have a 2650 SqFt home with NG heating. Its ~5 years old new construction and last months bill is conveniently compared to that of a friend who I carpool with. His home is about 3/4 the size of mine (1900-2000), but his home is all electric. Both are stick-built via developers.
In my home, there is myself and the wife. Daytime temperatures while present is usually 65ºF (at most), and 58ºF when not home or during sleeping hours. Carpool friend keeps his home at 70ºF minimally, because his wife and two teenage daughters like it warm.
I compared my heating & HW bill (nuking, grilling, or crock-po/oven via electric, with very little NG cooktop use) of $244 for mid-November to mid-December to his for the same period. We are relatively close (hence the carpool). His electric bill for this period, which includes his electric heat and HW, was $130. Now, if I include my electric for the same period, my expense is ~$315 … compared to his $130.
If his home was only 2/3 the size of mine and factor in 50% to his bill, I am still $315 vs. $195, yet my house is typically +5º colder during the day, and 12º at night. Funny thing is that he told me last week that his current home is better ‘insulated’. He based this on his average monthly heat/cooling is lower while keeping more confortable.
While I understand the logic is expected that NG is cheaper per BTU, I have always contested this logic in my operating location. I’m about 450miles outside of Atlanta.
Replies
What are your NG and electric rates?
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I agree that something sounds amiss here. $130.00 for his ENTIRE utility bill in a cool month sounds very cheap. It is the heating season where you live, isn't it?
He must have much lower electric rates than you. Are lower rates offered when heating by electric? What are your respective rates?
Heating season? You tell me: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ifps/MapClick.php?CityName=Winder&state=GA&site=FFC
Your KWH use, beyond heating, looks high compared to his. Older refrigerator? We are going to pay for a new one in 4 yrs of reduced elec consumption here. Shoot, I tightened the doors and cut off $3/mo operating cost (~dime/KWH). This one's looking for a new home. Elec dryer use, or not, will add up too.
Beyond that, assuming he's got a heat pump, your link shows almost no resistance use at his place. Drop those temps a little, to ours, and he'd be running a lot of resistance heat. PAHS Designer/Builder- Bury it!
VaTom, are you saying my electric looks high compared to carpool friend? I hadn't really considered $68/winter-month as being high, especially compared to the $150-175 it can easily get during a typical summer month. The refrigerator is as old as my house, which is five years old. It is a Whirlpool Conquest unit. I have a nice CRT-based RPTV, a CRT front projector, a couple of computers that are using running while we are home and awake, etc.
VaTom, are you saying my electric looks high compared to carpool friend?
Yes. That would leave him more (larger %) of his electric bill for heat. Which is what you're asking about.
I've been studying our elec usage. Kind of surprising, when you get to checking. Kill-A-Watt is a little gizmo that goes between your appliance and the wall plug. Measures and remembers current consumption over time. Don't know as yours does, but can add up to be substantial. Only one way to find out.
Really too many assumptions to get much of a clear picture. Like your $68 bill. Is it high compared to your friend? I don't know, but maybe. Refrigerators, resistance water heaters, and elec dryers are the normal big users. Here, I do some arc welding and I can see the difference. That sort of thing.
Follow BillHartman's advice. Or actually do heat loss calcs on the houses and find out how much heat they should be consuming. Usually that's an eye-opener. PAHS Designer/Builder- Bury it!
Kill-A-Watt is a little gizmo that goes between your appliance and the wall plug. Measures and remembers current consumption over time.
gotta link? - - how much $? - - I'm interested -
"there's enough for everyone"
http://search.ebay.com/kill-a-watt_W0QQfkrZ1QQfromZR8QQsatitleZkillQ2daQ2dwatt
Didn't read these, but I paid about $25 with shipping.
Alternative archys are often very sensitive to elec use, as we all should be. If you're aiming for off-grid it's a very big financial deal. For the rest of us, a little conservation seems far preferable to another power plant.
I got more serious when our elec jumped $30/mo (50%). Not from increased usage or unit charges. Change in billing for deregulation. For some of us, spending less means we don't have to earn so much. Or have more to salt away, whatever.PAHS Designer/Builder- Bury it!
Say what? I want to know where I can get one of these Kill-A-Watt devices!
I think I found it: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001067.php
Edited 1/15/2006 9:32 am ET by Nuke
That's it. Some folks have bought several but I was perfectly happy to use my 1 sequentially. For something like a refrigerator, measuring draw is about the only way to know if it's working right, assuming it's cold inside. But the draw isn't consistant, so you have to leave it for a week or so to get much of an idea what's happening.
Then I could compare my refer to EnergyStar ones and conclude that, even amortized with interest, a new one'd pay for itself in under 4 yrs. Pretty impressive. Assuming a considerably longer lifespan than 4 yrs, "free" use after that.
These small decisions add up. When I switched to a heat pump water heater for summer use, payback was about 1 season. Everybody gets excited about compact fluorescents. They're good, but lights usually aren't your big power users.
I was recently told here that a relatively small heating/cooling cost was as adequate as my no cost system. Yikes. Needs to get his head back out in the sunlight. Taking a look at lifespan costs (of any system) gives a better picture.
Notice Kill-A-Watt's only for 120v.PAHS Designer/Builder- Bury it!
When I switched to a heat pump water heater for summer use, payback was about 1 season.
tell me about this - an add-on to your supplemental heat source? a stand alone unit? -
thinking I've missed out on a lot of stuff the last 15 years -
"there's enough for everyone"
Mine, also ebay, supplements a tank heater. Small pack, 9x16x24, hangs on the wall near the water heater. It takes heat out of the air and puts it into the water. Upwards of 3x more efficient than resistance heat. Byproducts are cool dry air (sound like ac?), and distilled water.
We don't use the water, but other units are engineered specifically to provide drinking water. Dehumidification is a big deal here with our non-ac house. We get 50% of our dehumidification needs (for 20k cu ft) from the heat pump. So.... either free dehumidification or free hot water, take your pick. Even solar doesn't compete.
There used to be a great gov't site about them, no longer. The best I've found is: http://www.energy.wsu.edu/ftp-ep/pubs/building/res/ht_pmp_water_htrs.pdf Ours is an E-Tech that worked great with a normal water heater.
Heat pump water heaters have been around a long time, never achieved large popularity. A Popular Science article from 1980 mentioned the E-Tech. Perhaps a little more attention to utility costs will help them.PAHS Designer/Builder- Bury it!
Using the square foot area in a home is a very rough way of calculating potential energy use. The aspect ratio or form factor of the house has a major influence on the surface area of the house exposed to the weather .
Rambling ranch homes are notoriously hard to heat if built up north. Traditional designs of an area are usually pretty good. The two and three story saltbox homes have a lot of floor are while minimizing the surface area exposed to the weather.
A compact design also limits the lengths of duct runs, which allows a small blower to be used, and sometimes has them withing the building shell so heat losses are further minimized.
In terms of floor area to surface area a dome, spherical shape, is ideal.
There are other factors, outside of insulation, which greatly bear on heating costs. Trees and brush plantings situated to block the prevailing wind can lower heating costs. Orienting the house to have more surface and large windows exposed to the sun can take advantage of significant amounts of solar heat gain. Even when the design doesn't get into actual collectors or storage the sun is still a factor. Our ancestors designed, situated and oriented their houses to take advantage of the situation. A skill we have largely lost.
It might be interesting to include these factors in the comparison between houses.
My development was simply clear-cut for the initial phase my house was built in. So, I accept that the natural blocking effect from wind trees could bring is not available to me. I also agree that SqFt is no where near the best means of getting an accurate proportionality comparison.
Now, my home is essentially a rectangular box. I may have once denoted the rear-wall (the wall with the most windows) as facing the south, but actually its the southwest. The prevailing windows are majorically from the west, but even with lots of afternoon sunlight this weekend's winds are bleeding the home dry--literally.
When I go to sell this home, it must be in the early fall or mid-spring weather--otherwise its easier to burn down, lol.
Nuke,
Something is missing from this equation.
I live in a twenty year old townhouse Just west of Allentown P.A. I'm an inside unit of about 1750 sqft. I have electric everything. My Electric bill this winter, a warm one by all accounts has averaged $240 a month. I've got a nice exposure to the afternoon sun and good wind blockage.
I don't believe electric is as expensive to heat with as some do but $130 for everything sounds lite.
Ok, I know his wife does all the books in their household. I'll ask him to prove it. And while we live relative close to one another, we are actually in different counties. I am not sure how that plays into anything, though.
All I know is that NG in my area is expensive. Has been expensive the entire time I've been in this home all the while others around Atlanta have been claiming the same. Somethings I wonder if its cheaper to rip out all of the drywall or the exterior siding and sheathing and rebuild this house.
Either way you look at it, for the temps noted above mid-November to mid-December was >$300, and I know the following will be higher. And since anything NG in Winter is an expensive thing, I may need to question NG for anything in my home with the exception of the outdoor grill and the HW.
Now, if I could find an NG AC unit to offset the cheap summertime NG to run the AC ...
I wonder if he might have been on budget billing or something like that, and that's why his bill was low. No way to know without looking at it.
I like to play games with my pets. The other day I was playing badminton with my parakeet.
I agree. I'll need to find this out, especially since he doesn't do the household financing. But, I am certainly not going to ignore the possability that his house is better built, or ignore than he has some natural surrounds to protect from the bleeding wind. We'll see ...
Nuke,
You really aren't saying anything other than it costs more to heat your house than your carpool buddy.
What you haven't said for example is how well insulated each home is.. two identical homes can have vastly differant heating bills depending on how the house is sitted on the land. Is one home facing the south while another faces the north? Does one house have foam insulation while another is fiberglas?
Does one have 2x6 walls while the other has 2x4 walls? how well don is the insulation in each home?
Some times even the same crew does a great job on one home and a sloppy job on the other.. How well sealed up is each house? Little leaks really add to heating costs.. I mean a entry door with a gap at the bottom or lose windows etc.. In fact windows themselves can change the heating bill.. Two panes with low E and argon filled are well over twice as efficent as single pane glass. is one set of window wood and another vinyal or aluminum (both poor at insulating)?
Finally how efficent is your furnace? Not what it reads on the data plaque but what it actually performs like..
What about where heat comes out.. If you have a forced air furnace that blows heat out the air moving past you can give you a chill and cause you to set the thermostat up.. where he might have in floor radiant heat which can be set much lower and still feel very warm and comfortable.
It's hard to compare apples and oranges as and electric but efficent electric can be cheaper than poor quality gas.
"While I understand the logic is expected that NG is cheaper per BTU,"
That logic is COMPLETELY FALSE. While there is some difference in gas rates around the country they are still in the same range.
HOWEVER, electric rates vary DRASTICALLY from area to area. In the wint er my incremental rates are around 3.4 cents per kWh and if I have electric heating then I save another 10%. Some other places are paying upt 10, 12 and mybe even 15 cents.
In my area resistive heating was about the same as gas prices LAST YEAR and that was befoe the run up in prices.
But most electric heating is done with via a heat pump and "depending" might save an average of 1/2 to 1/3 of the cost of resistive.
Also he might be on a level pay plan where that is the year around average cost.
But another clue is the time period that you used. You need to know the exact dates of of the electric usage period and the electric usage period. If they different by more than a few days it can really through off the comparision.
Mid Nov- Mid Dec is a try of great weather temp changes, but up and down. So one might have a week of very cold weather that the other bill does not cover.
A SUM of Decmember, Jan, and Feb will be much more meaningfull.
You might want to compare your bill with some of your neighbors with similar houses and furnaces.
"While I understand the logic is expected that NG is cheaper per BTU,"
That logic is COMPLETELY FALSE. While there is some difference in gas rates around the country they are still in the same range.
Bill, with all do respect, in my area the NG is wholesales to retail marketers that can charge whatever they would like. As such, there can be as much as +/-50% difference in one person's rate compared to the next. That's not fantasy, that's Atlanta Light & Gas for you. Also, those in my area are tied to a city with no means to get competition for a chance at a better rate, like some in the Atlanta area can do. As such, whatever the city of Buford wishes to charge, can and will.
Actually, its been an anomalous period of recent. For January, which is typically a even-cold month, has seen highs from the mid-30ºF up to 70ºF. One day I am freezing my booty at home, and the other I am turning the truck's AC on.
And as I said, I will try to get more accurate information on my friend's household utility bill since he is all electric. I guess he has a heat-pump, but I really don't know. I only know he doesn't have gas, and during the cold month HW+heat are the dominant consumers in my home. I'll also try for a lnger period. My wife just told me she's got every gas and electric bill since we moved into this home back on 12/12/00. Wow. Time to put together a spreadsheet.