My electricity usage over the last two years with charts.

When you think about electric bills, you often have a picture of the massive sprawl being built out West, saying to yourself ‘all those damn air conditioners killing the environment. If only they lived in the NorthEast they could clean the air from all the pollution.”

Not so fast.

It’s been known and published for awhile that cooling a house is often a cheaper endeavor than heating one. Going from say 30 degree outside to 70 is a lot harder than going down from 90 to say 75, so the theory goes.

So I decided to check into it myself. Using my own power bills for the last two years, I took a look at the usage vs. the temperature and found, not all that surprising, that in my all electric house (heat pump/ac) it cost me the most money in the coldest months.

Anyway, kind of interesting. Here are the raw numbers. I’m going to take a closer look at what this all entails (the heat pump & water heater are the bulk of this expense I think, but I do have a lot of computers and other things running in the house nearly 24/7).

Month Days Total KW Avg/Day Temp
Sep-08 32 2404 75.1 70
Aug-08 28 2548 91 74
Jul-08 34 3391 99.7 77
Jun-08 28 2317 82.8 75
May-08 31 2062 66.5 60
Apr-08 32 2733 85.4 55
Mar-08 29 3275 112.9 44
Feb-08 29 4050 139.7 37
Jan-08 33 4053 122.8 36
Dec-07 33 3836 116.2 40
Nov-07 31 2495 80.5 47
Oct-07 32 2098 65.6 64
Sep-07 29 2448 84.4 72
Aug-07 30 2939 98 77
Jul-07 32 3207 100.2 77
Jun-07 30 2578 85.9 73
May-07 33 2333 70.7 65
Apr-07 28 2115 75.5 50
Mar-07 31 2748 88.6 45
Feb-07 28 4083 145.8 28
Jan-07 33 3836 116.2 40
Dec-06 29 2547 87.8 43
Nov-06 30 2704 90.1 49
Oct-06 31 2300 74.2 55

In this table below, the Blue line is the KWH per month and the red line is the temperature.

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