Electric bill for heating/cooling a 3500-4000 sqft house in Vegas?

July 3, 2017 6:42 PM

How much would it cost per month to keep your house heated/cooled if you lived somewhere like Vegas and had a rather large house (say, 3500-4000 sq. feet?)
posted by jtothes to Home & Garden (8 answers total)

I live in Southern California, not Vegas. So the electricity rates are probably different. But my house is that size, and we get temperatures in the 90s and 100s in the summer. Our electric bill is anywhere between $600 and $900 a month in the summer. We keep our place pretty cool. We could save money by keeping it warmer.

If you're thinking of buying a place, this isn't an unreasonable question to ask the real estate agent.
posted by primethyme at 7:09 PM on July 3, 2017

A decent place to start would be to check on heating/cooling degree days, from which you could extrapolate a lot of generic data, but there are a lot of variables involved in HVAC cost other than just square feet (volume, construction type, solar exposure, insulation values, etc). So, in August of 2013 as an example, Las Vegas had 763 cooling degree days. If you're thinking of comparing say, the house you currently live in that's located somewhere else, you could compare your heating/cooling cost for that month, expressed as KW/h per degree day. You could even break it down to KW/h per degree day per square foot if you wanted to.

So, say you have a 2000 s.f. house someplace that had 380 cooling degree days in August of 2013. Assuming electricity rates and AC efficiency are the same (not likely), it'd cost 4x as much to cool the 4000 square foot house in Vegas that month (twice the cooling load at twice the square footage).
posted by LionIndex at 7:12 PM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Around here you can get records for an address from the power company.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 7:50 PM on July 3, 2017 [7 favorites]

It depends. For summer: Is there vegetation shading the house? Do you open all the windows, curtain, and doors at night and shut them all in the morning? How thick are your walls and what are they made of? Etc.
posted by aniola at 8:00 PM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

In places like Vegas, they don't usually use refrigerated air conditioners, they use swamp coolers, which are much cheaper to run. So that should be taken into account in any calculations.
posted by MexicanYenta at 8:00 PM on July 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

In my experience, a big (presumably fancy-ish) desert house will be equipped with both swamp coolers and AC, because the swamp coolers stop working when the monsoon starts. This is a very reasonable question to ask, and I'd ask for details about the home's cooling system(s).
posted by workerant at 8:21 PM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

I know someone who lives in the sunny Southwest, and they installed electricity-generating solar panels on their roof, and also minisplit heat pumps (which run on electric, and provide high-efficiency heat and cooling). Some months they receive money back from the electric company because the panels produce more electricity than the mini-splits use to cool the house. I believe solar panels have a government rebate still, or some other sort of tax incentive for installing them. Vegas is in one of the sunniest spots in the world. If you're buying a house in Vegas, this idea might be worth thinking about, as it would add value to the house, be good for the environment, and lower your electric bills considerably.
posted by ClaireBear at 8:55 PM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

The answer to this will definitely depend on if the place has a heat pump or not. And if it's Spanish style or the idiotic east coast, colonial style McMansions they built all over. If you have a specific place in mind you can call the power company and get records anywhere in the US I think.
posted by fshgrl at 11:57 PM on July 3, 2017