One of the most common frustrations we hear from people are those unusually high summer energy bills or winter bills that just blows your budget for the month. Most people in America go through hot summers or cold winters, and as we mentioned before, people can feel the difference between a properly conditioned home and one that requires you to wear a parka or sit in front of a fan.

If you are Californian, this problem of “suddenly big bills” will likely be further exacerbated by the switch to TOU (Time of Use) electricity pricing by the year 2020. The new electricity pricing could make air conditioners and heaters even more expensive. Why? Because they may work overtime when everyone else’s are. In TOU pricing, these times are called “peak demand” times, and they cost more.

We’ve covered how to reduce summer bills in a two-part series. Now, for winter. The first common cause for expensive winter bill is that your home is using expensive electric heating. This is especially true if there is a fairly large portion of your winter bill that is unexplained.

Reduce Use of Expensive Electric Heating

With high electric rates, using any “resistance based” electric heaters can be very expensive, and much cheaper alternatives now exist. Chances are that you use natural gas via a furnace to heat up the space (or air) in your home. Resistive electric heating is usually used to heat up stuff aside from the air in your home. We cover space heating in a separate article. It’s a bigger topic.

In addition to old resistive electric devices being very costly to use, some other electric heating devices stay on much longer than you need them to. Here are some examples:

• Heated towel racks can draw 140 watts all the time, wasting nearly $500 of electricity per year.
• Some types of heated floors stay on all the time because of the cooling coming from below — they are effectively trying to heat the earth under your home. One of our guest writers who coaches people on energy savings have talked about how heated floors can waste energy. He’s talked discovering some outrageous cases.
  

Switch to Heat Pumps

If you are using resistive electric heaters you are probably using three times more electricity than an equivalent electric heat pump system would use. Consider a new heat pump space heater like these. “Heat pump” is a newer type of device which we mentioned before. Also, here’s a description of heat pump devices from the Department of Energy.

Note: We do not get commissions from Amazon or retailers; links are provided as examples.

Unnoticed Electric Heating?

It might be an electric fan associated with your forced air heating system, but usually this is a small electric load, and there are several other possibilities: perhaps there is a hidden or unknown resistive space heater left on a thermostat, or a heated tile floor that is not really off, or a decorative fireplace that emits heat?

We’ve even seen a case when the oven was used in the winter months to warm up the house! There are far more efficient methods available.