May 13th – June 11th, 29 days
We are finally maintaining only one residence. Let me tell you, as convenient as it was to have a place to stay in both of the cities that my husband works in for the past six months, two homes is hard. And expensive. Especially with only one home’s worth of stuff.
During that time, we of course also had two different utility bills, which was quite interesting. Each place was serviced by a different utility company, MG&E, and Alliant, but the offerings as far as renewable energy went were pretty much the same. Our apartment was about 500 square feet, and had electric baseboard heating. And let me tell you, our energy costs there were much higher than for our 1000 square foot house that has a gas furnace. It was surprising to me just how expensive and inefficient electric heating is. I’ll get more into that in a future post.
So now we have one home. One energy bill. And now the burden of maintenance is on us rather than a landlord. Time to get busy.
Again, nothing special in terms of upgrades for energy efficiency this month. We’re spending most of our time and energy this spring and summer on our yard and garden and all that outside stuff that it sure is nice to have warm weather to complete. But it’s important to have months where we don’t make any big changes and just live in our home so we can get a sense of our baseline energy use.
This month’s upgrade cost: $0
Total upgrade cost to date: $17.64
Over 29 days we used 390 KWH. Which comes out to an average 13.4 KWH/day. Compared to the last billing period average of 15.5 KWH/day, we dropped a bit, due to spending a week or so in our apartment getting ready to move out.
We are part of the Alliant Energy Second Nature renewable energy program, at the 100% level. (In this program you can choose the amount of your energy use that you want to be matched in renewables, and we chose 100%.) The cost of our renewable energy increased on June 1st, So the cost of our electricity is $0.13 per KWH for the 18 days of May on our bill, and $0.14 per KWH for the 11 days of June, for a total of $52.68.
This month we used 0 Therms of natural gas heat energy. Which averages out to 0.0 Therms/day. However we did still have a small charge to keep our gas on this month, and probably also to pay for meter readers and what not. Degree days this month compared to last month: 148 vs. 347.
The natural gas market fluctuates in Wisconsin, so there is not an easy dollar per Therm number to give you, but during this billing period we paid $8.93 for our gas use.
Our energy bill also provides these numbers for helpful comparison:
Electricity used this month last year: 758 KWH. I imagine this number is going to drop pretty significantly in coming months, because we’re almost to the point where the previous owners of the house listed it for sale, and during that time they were already living in a different residence.
Gas used this month last year: 1 Therm. Average temperature this month: 63° F. This month last year: 54° F.
Degree Days this month: 148 vs this month last year: 108. Degree days are the number of degrees below 65° F in one day, all added together for the total 29 days of the billing period.
…
Have you signed up for the building earth newsletter yet? You can do that here!
Want to see previous months of the Energy Efficiency Project? Here is Month 1, Month 2, Month 3, Month 4, and Month 5.
Keep up with building earth by following us on facebook, pinterest, or on @buildingearth on instagram