Where do I start with this one

January 27, 2021 10:29 AM

I have a problem I don't know how to start solving, and the problem is this: Over the last few months our electricity bill has shot up from ~$200 to ~$400 to ALMOST SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS. The electricity company's website suggests that our highest energy utilization is heating, but if we were using as much heating as they're saying our house would have exploded.

It's a 3-story townhouse we are renting. The house is about 10 years old & we've been living here for about 5 years. We are in the Bay Area, CA. We keep our thermostat at a normal human level and hardly even adjust it very much. It's not even as warm as I'd like it to be much of the time/which I mention because I want to explain the scope of the problem: it's not like it's a sauna in here, I'm sitting here with frozen toes right now and yet I owe almost a thousand dollars for heat, it doesn't add up.

The only thing that's recently changed is that a few weeks ago there was no heat coming out of the vents, which was solved by having the filters replaced (for the first time).

The thing I am not clear on is who should I ask to help me with this? I feel like anyone I can think of to ask about this, either the landlord or the electricity company, are just going to shrug and tell us to use less heat, but that's clearly not the problem, so how should I approach this? How should I explain it? Should I just avoid the landlord and hire my own guy?

Thank you for your advice!

posted by bleep to Home & Garden (39 answers total)

Stealing electricity is a real thing. Be certain none of your neighbors is stealing your power.
posted by Dolley at 10:35 AM on January 27, 2021 [12 favorites]

DO you have any idea how much your neighbors are using? It definitely sounds like something is fucked up in the readings somewhere. If you can get an idea of how much they're paying vs you, that might bolster your case.
posted by Alensin at 10:36 AM on January 27, 2021

a few weeks ago there was no heat coming out of the vents

This is it. If the heat isn't functioning efficiently it'll stay on instead of being regulated by the thermostats. In effect, it's the same as if you set the thermostats to 90º.
posted by supercres at 10:36 AM on January 27, 2021 [8 favorites]

Are you sure it is your heat causing the drain? I would shut it off and check the meter to see how much current is being used. If you have any outside outlets someone may be stealing electricity to charge their car or heat their tent.
posted by leaper at 10:37 AM on January 27, 2021 [6 favorites]

What kind of heating system? Gas, electric heat pump? Any space heaters?
posted by Huffy Puffy at 10:37 AM on January 27, 2021

Response by poster: This is it. If the heat isn't functioning efficiently it'll stay on instead of being regulated by the thermostats. In effect, it's the same as if you set the thermostats to 90º.

I thought there might be a spike in the bill after we got that fixed while the system leveled out, and there was, but I wasn't expecting a second spike!

We don't have any space heaters, it's just hot air that comes out of the vents & is driven by electricity, I guess? I don't know how to find this out either.
posted by bleep at 10:41 AM on January 27, 2021

Do you have a smart meter, or one that is read have read manually? My neighbour had an issue with her hydro, turns out the meter was giving way incorrect readings. I also had an instance last year where we somehow were paying for the neighbours power for usage for a couple months? I noticed it and asked them to investigate, they were able to sort it out and credit our account. Second thing I thought of is the possibility of someone hooking into your power with an outside utility box or lines ? I've also heard of that happening, you can ask your electricity utility to come check out your power lines to make sure they are intact. Third would be to get your landlord to get your heating system checked out by a professional to see if it is functioning currently.
posted by snowysoul at 10:41 AM on January 27, 2021 [3 favorites]

years ago I had a slow drip hot water leak, and an electric water heater, and that combined into a $1000 electricity bill.
posted by th3ph17 at 10:42 AM on January 27, 2021 [4 favorites]

Your bill should have an energy used category and then you just multiply by the rate per KWH to get your bill. Mine has the actual meter read values (read automatically). So you can turn stuff off and check your meter to make sure it is close to the value written on the bill, and you can seprately check your approximate rate per KWH. For comparison, and old bill I referenced by rate was $.10 per kwh.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:44 AM on January 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

Are you renting all three stories of the townhouse? Distressingly common to be accidentally paying for a neighbor in the same building's utility, even more than a neighbor down the block.

Please do call the utility company. If there's some kind of major short or fault or as th3ph17 points out a faulty water heater, they want to know about it and they can do inspections. Whether or not your landlord will have to be the one to request it will depend on the company but if you're paying the bill yourself it's good odds that you will be able to ask for it, and it should not cost you anything.
posted by peppercorn at 10:44 AM on January 27, 2021 [7 favorites]

The stealing electricity aspect is a possibility. If you can get to your meter and your main distribution panel you should at least be able to do a visual look for anything that might be out of place without touching/tampering with anything.
Assuming that yields nothing, I think calls to both the utility and landlord are in order. That is well out of line and there are various potential causes, from malfunctioning heating equipment to a bad meter. At the very least your landlord should be able to explain how the system is supposed to work.
Given that this is a rental, absolutely bring the landlord into the discussion sooner than later. If they are the type to use a 'turn down the heat' response to what is clearly a system problem they'll do that regardless of your legwork ahead of time, so you still may as well get the ball rolling.
posted by meinvt at 10:45 AM on January 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

I would look at a few things while you also try to get help from the landlord & power company -
- has your electricity rate changed?
- how many kWh are you using this year compared to last year? (Also do you usually set back the heat when you leave the house and have you maybe stopped leaving the house?)
- if you look at your meter can you see the dials spinning? Do they spin noticeably faster when the heat is running compared to when the heat is not running?
- with your two big bills, what was the time period they covered compared to when you got the heat fixed?

Given that the heat stopped working completely and all you did was replace the filters, I bet there's still something wrong with the HVAC.
posted by mskyle at 10:52 AM on January 27, 2021 [6 favorites]

Googling electricity cost in san fran i get 22.3 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh). If your normal winter bill is $400 and the high bill is $700, the $300 added cost comes out to 1345 kWh of additional usage. That's like leaving a hair dryer on continuously for a month and a half. A couple of space heaters would do it if it is cold and they are on 70% of the time.

Are their other renters? If the heat was not working, and say the 1st floor unit made do with space heaters until the filters were changed, and that was running on your meter, that could be it.

Is someone charging an electric vehicle at an outside outlet?

Is there a sump pump or three running all the time?

I think you will have to call the landlord, but I would also call the utility as it could be something very wrong.
posted by sol at 10:57 AM on January 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

You need to find out what sort of heat you have. Gas? Electric? Heatpump?

Your description of a sky-high bill and no heat being blown, makes me wonder if you don't have a heatpump that has given up the ghost. If that has happened, the auxiliary heat will have probably kicked-in to heat the place. That normally consists of a set of resistance coils/strips in the air handler that heat up. This is about as inefficient a heat source as can be, as it's not intended to heat the full house for an extended time. It's merely meant to help the heatpump get through the really frigid times, but in limited spurts. But, if the heatpump itself is dead, those auxiliary strips will be on 24/7, and your electric bill will hit the moon very quickly.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:01 AM on January 27, 2021 [18 favorites]

The bill is probably catching up to the massive amount used when your heater was on but not giving heat. Look at the numbers on the meter and see how much they increase per day, to see if you are now using an abnormal amount of electricity. If your current rate is too high, then you need to find out why, but I guess the reason was the previous event and the bill is just catching up.; there's maybe a hole in the duct somewhere blowing hot air into the attic or something.
posted by flimflam at 11:03 AM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Can you see your meter? Can you see the usage changing in real time? Try turning off _everything_ (unplug the refrigerator, turn off the thermostat, unplug all "wall wart" transformers, unplug _everything_ [a lot of things with electronic switches are actually 'on' in a small way all the time], then look at the meter. Is power still being consumed? If so, you have a more focused mystery.

Also - it might be worthwhile to check your computer for viruses. If someone is running an intensive process while you think the computer is powered down, that might make an impact.
posted by amtho at 11:04 AM on January 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

My electric utility will let me download my usage by hour as a CSV file. If yours allows that, it might help you notice in patterns or sudden changes.
posted by primethyme at 11:10 AM on January 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

The electric company is definitely worth calling. Some even offer efficiency audits - part of a general emphasis on conservation. They may have some good ways to help you, including helping you determine if someone is stealing power from you. They might even help you by agreeing that the bill sounds like an error - and either adjusting it or allowing you to pay in installments.

They can also help you (over the phone, probably) learn about things like looking at hourly usage, or looking for atypical usage patterns that indicate particular kinds of problems.
posted by amtho at 11:17 AM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

My electric company will come to your house and do an energy audit for a small fee
posted by bq at 11:32 AM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Well I did go ahead and email the landlord thanks to your encouragement and yes his suggestion was to stop using so much heat and also that his bills were always that high when he was living here haha how do I get to cushy gig like that. Calling the company now. Thanks for your help & keep it coming if you have more!
posted by bleep at 12:18 PM on January 27, 2021 [4 favorites]

Another thought - if you've lived there 5 years and it's never spiked like this before, the reason may be that you're working from home now, and using full heat all the time. Whereas before, maybe you were turning the heat down when you left home in the morning.
posted by hydra77 at 12:24 PM on January 27, 2021 [8 favorites]

What Thorzdad said is what happened to us in an apartment building a few years ago. We had to turn off the heat and borrow space heaters until it got fixed, which took about a week. The space heaters definitely reduced our bill in the meantime. I think the filters not being changed may have caused the issue that broke everything so badly.
posted by Night_owl at 12:26 PM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Our heating bill increased by 50% since the pandemic, and through careful trial and error (literally turning off power breaker switch by breaker) we figured out that it was from 2 factors. 1. we were using more electricity mid-day as we were now working from home and the pricing was more expensive. and 2. We were cooking more regularly mid day and in particular, broiling meat more and turns out that's a massive suck on power.

It sucks since our apartment is all super efficient and everything is on smart outlets so we thought we were doing the right things, but a slightly increased cost of electricity coupled with the more frequent stove usage really did end up being the main cost driver.

(We have a smart meter that sends data in 15 min increments to our provider, so we could download usage and compare it to cooking times etc)
posted by larthegreat at 12:29 PM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Not to get off the heating thing but just turning on Christmas lighting (inside and outside) adds a non-trivial chunk to our electricity bill during the holidays.

I have them on a timer but they're old incandescent bulbs and together they're easily pulling 1000-1500 watts when everything is on. Multiply 2-3 months by 8 hours per evening and it adds up.
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:42 PM on January 27, 2021

Sounds like you have already reached out to the electric company; I was coming in to say that this is how I solved a similar issue when one of my utility bills quadrupled one month, even though I hadn't done a single thing differently in my two-plus years at that address. I called someone at the office to discuss it, and they sent someone out to investigate and ascertained that the meter had gone haywire and was giving incorrect readings. They replaced the meter, then figured out a usage for the incorrectly billed month based on my billing history. It's possible that the meter itself may be on the fritz, and if you've been at that address for a while they may just calculate a "guesstimate" that way if this is what's going on.

(The best part of my story is - I'd paid the artificially-high bill as a sign of faith while they were investigating, and they credited the overpayment back to my account - so I carried a credit on my bills for that account for the next three months and didn't have to pay them anything until the credit had cleared.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:22 PM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Our power and water bills spiked recently (in suburban Rhode Island). My wife called in; the power company had some suggestions, and the water company gave a song and dance.

We paid $32 for a Kill-A-Watt device to see just where our electrical usage went up. (I suggested Xmas lights and the college boy playing video games 12 damn hours a day, but...)

It turns out that the dehumidifier takes a lot of juice, as does the fridge. Of course, they each have a compressor, and basically anything with a motor is an energy hog, compared to like an LED light or Internet router or whatever.

She also went on a water-saving campaign and everyone only gets a five-minute shower.

It turns out that a lot of people around here got suspiciously high bills, and made a fuss, and this month they are rational again. Who knew...
posted by wenestvedt at 1:26 PM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Sometimes they don't read the meter every month. Say they read it every 2nd month and then in between meter readings is a bill based on estimated/historical usage. Or they send around the reader to get the reading from some electronic reader thing and it happens to burp for a minute and doesn't give a reading. So they bill for that month based on estimated/historical usage.

This can cause your bill to spike in unusual ways, because say your heat pump malfunctioned during one of the estimated billing periods. So it used a ton of electricity that month and the next, but you didn't notice because your estimated bill looks completely normal (because it is an average of past usage, thus by definition normal).

Then the next month they get the actual meter reading and it is tremendously high because now is it catching the actual excess usage for both the current month and the previous month. All of that excess usage is added to the one month's bill and--help! That looks really huge.

Maybe it was actually $200 extra for each of two months but what you see on the bill is one normal month and then one month with $400 extra.

So, something like this could be part of the problem. The electric company should be able to see if something like this happened and explain how it works, if it did. Also, there is often some notation in your monthly bill as to whether it is based on actual meter reading or some estimate.
posted by flug at 2:20 PM on January 27, 2021 [3 favorites]

As many said, you need to check the meters yourself and determine your weekly, if not daily energy expenditures, and if necessary, call out a tech to check why it's consuming so much energy.
posted by kschang at 3:11 PM on January 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

FWIW, I bought an Amaze panel heater, the smallest model, 250W, and it warms up a room pretty nicely as they are wall-based convection panel heaters, which uses a LOT less energy.
posted by kschang at 3:16 PM on January 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

This highlights how in the dark most people are about things in their home that are wasting energy. Watching spinning power meters and turning everything off to identify loads is just too hard. Learning about problems after they've wasted power for a month is not good. There are things that can make this easier, one is the Sense power meter, which is able to learn what devices are in your home and can show detailed information per device.

It's kind of expensive at $250, and you'll need to hire an electrican to install it in your electrical panel, and it's not a quick fix to your problem, but it would be a good investment if you take this as a learning opportunity and use it to keep on top of excess power use going forward.
posted by joeyh at 3:22 PM on January 27, 2021

I once got an electric bill for $19,000. The people at PECO were very nice about accidentally charging me for the entire city block, and in hindsight, I am desperately glad that this was the era of paper bills and I didn't get my bank account overdrawn by an entire year's income.

So yeah -- another vote for spend some time on the phone with the electric company! Honestly, I'd plan to always go to them first, especially since they can locate issues your landlord put in place. (Ask me about the time my landlord hired someone to re-wire the building and they managed to entirely blow my circuit! Which I only learned when my heat didn't go on! Anyway, good electricians are awesome.)
posted by kalimac at 4:38 PM on January 27, 2021 [5 favorites]

First thing to do is check your meter against what the electric company says. Multiple times I've seen them not read the meter and give estimates that are several times what was actually being used.

From there? The Kill-a-watt suggestion above is a good one.
posted by wotsac at 8:01 PM on January 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

Something similar happened to me and it turned out to be what flug said — unfortunately, they were doing estimated readings instead of reading the meter (all of us worked during the day so nobody was ever home to let the meter reader in). Then someone finally read the meter, and it turned out the readings had been low for months, and so I got charged hundreds of bucks extra all at once.
posted by en forme de poire at 8:39 PM on January 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

You should be able to log into your account with PG&E and see your daily usage by hour to see when the electricity is being used and in what amount. I did this and could see exactly what time sunset was as that's when our electricity usage shot up as we turned our lights on. This may help you decipher what could be using the electricity. PG&E will also do an energy audit for you if you reach out.

A couple other things - are you heating the entire 3 stories of the house at once? Bay Area houses are often not insulated (particularly the rentals) and are drafty. Many people use space heaters just to heat whatever room they are in. It's been really cold lately- I could see a 3 story house costing $700 in electricity. Our bill isn't as high as yours as our house is much smaller, but I'll note looking at the energy usage, it doubled from October to November, then again from November to December and so on as it got colder and darker. Covid is also a big driver of this as we are home more.

One last thought - is your fan on constantly, even if the heat isn't? Our electricity bill was the most expensive it's ever been during the wildfires when we had just the fan going to run the air in our house through the filter - no heat or AC running. Check your thermostat to make sure the fan isn't currently just turned to "on" rather than "auto".

If you are stuck regarding being able to pay, PGE does have financial assistance, and they also have a program where you pay a set rate throughout the year that helps balance out the big spikes in the winter.
posted by Toddles at 10:42 PM on January 27, 2021

Oops, actually an additional final thought - PGE has different programs based on your usage to help keep costs down. For example they analyze when you use the most energy and then suggest different plans based on it (i.e. pay more between 4-9pm and less at other times; tiered programs etc.)
posted by Toddles at 10:44 PM on January 27, 2021

Response by poster: I could see a 3 story house costing $700 in electricity. Our bill isn't as high as yours as our house is much smaller, but I'll note looking at the energy usage, it doubled from October to November, then again from November to December and so on as it got colder and darker.

The thing that makes it mysterious to me is that our usage/behavior hasn't changed, & the amount of heat we're experiencing in the rooms hasn't changed, only the bill has changed. I think I got the landlord working on sending someone to look at the heater again bc to me that is a sign of malfunction.
posted by bleep at 9:10 AM on January 28, 2021

Sometimes they don't read the meter every month. Say they read it every 2nd month and then in between meter readings is a bill based on estimated/historical usage.

If you live in a decent sized city in the US, you probably have a meter that sends data regularly back to your electric company using metadata that basically is relatively similar to mobile phone metadata. Meters are not manually read anymore.


usage/behavior hasn't changed, & the amount of heat we're experiencing in the rooms hasn't changed, only the bill has changed. I think I got the landlord working on sending someone to look at the heater again bc to me that is a sign of malfunction
You need to look into this more. Why would you have the landlord check the heater if your actual electric usage is the same (did you actually check that from your past bills?) only the cost is different? If your usage on your bill is the same, then you need to talk your electric company about the rate they are charging you.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:12 PM on January 28, 2021

Response by poster: I didn't phrase it very well, the system is drawing more power than before, but the amount of power the system actually needs hasn't changed. I don't know where all that extra power is going but it's not going into making me more comfortable in any way.
posted by bleep at 1:37 PM on January 28, 2021

If you live in a decent sized city in the US, you probably have a meter that sends data regularly back to your electric company using metadata that basically is relatively similar to mobile phone metadata. Meters are not manually read anymore.

This was not true in SF as recently as 2017, at least not for the building I lived in. However, I believe there was an option to self-report the reading over the phone, at least most of the time.
posted by en forme de poire at 11:48 AM on February 6, 2021