We got our electric bill a week and a half ago, and it is down another $100, which makes me breathe a huge sigh of relief.
However, it begs the question - why? We haven’t done anything differently in March, except not run the heat as much with the weather getting warmer.
I talked with my dad a month or so ago, and being the engineer that he is, he was running some numbers for me, “Well, say your heat fan uses X watts and you run it 70% of the time, you still wouldn’t be generating that much wattage..” etc.
Meaning, if our Kilowatt usage is this far down just because the heat hasn’t been running as much, maybe something is wrong with our furnace. My folks have a much bigger house than ours (probably double our sq footage) and also live in a much colder climate, and yet we have been using more power than they do.
We’ve generally ignored any flyers that came our way touting yearly heating/cooling system check ups, as this is a new home (4 years now), but maybe it’s time to look into something like this.
I’ve been wondering about something like this, and so took an informal poll of 3 of my co-workers. 2 did not do anything like this, and 1 did. I also asked how often they changed their air filters. One said, “A lot, at least once every 3 months,” while the other two said, “probably not often enough,” & “whenever I remember to.”
What about you? Do you have yearly system checkups? And how often do you change your filters?
-99k