What’s your square footage and if it’s down from last month, what was last month’s? A heart attack in a small white envelope?

Just wait until next month’s arrives with this string of 100+ days on it.

That’s an extraordinary high amount! Do you live in a freezer?

Our bill was about $400, and we have an old (1930)leaky 3200 sq foot two-story house. Since it would probably cost us about $20,000 to put in new windows, I’ll take a few hundred extra each month on the bill. We keep the downstairs at 75-76, but sleep upstairs at 72-73 degrees.

have you considered the average billing plan. helps spread it out over the year. consider closing the door to rooms you don’t use during the day this keeps the cool air in those rooms
have your thermostat checked and remember no home cooling system is designed to lower the temperature more than 20 degrees. So if is it 105 outside the best inside you can do is 85
use ceiling fans

Texans pay an average of 12.9 cents per kilowatt hour…one of the higher “average energy costs” in the nation (behind Hawaii, Alaska, and California). TXU sucks as a provider, and they make mistakes such as labeling “residential” properties as “commercial;” low and behold, commercial rates are higher than residential rates…It happened to a friend of mine who is renting a townhouse, and TXU has yet to re-classify the property (the only time a “townhouse” is a “commercial property” is when someone like Heidi Fleiss is your tenant…).

Newsweek just had an article about the cost of energy in all 50 states. We’re on the higher end of the energy cost continuum. So, de-regulation worked well…for companies like TXU. Oh, and if you have a smaller provider, there is a chance that if they go out of business / are bought out by a bigger company, that your rates will jump up too (that’s happening in the suburbs near Houston).

I’d suggest looking into solar panels–they’re actually becoming cost-effective (see the article in newsweek). My electrician was encouraging me to look into them (he hates TXU too, and is a big advocate of generating your own power).

Other energy savers: switch out regular incandescent lights for LED’s (which are $60-80 a pop…so enjoy the sticker shock on that), or Compact Florescents (they make dimable ones now, but they’re still kind of primitive).

Pretty much anything you have that has a clock, or little red light on it is sucking up energy even when it’s turned “off.” If you leave chargers in sockets when you aren’t charging anything, that’s also sucking on some energy.

Big(er) houses do come with big(er) bills…they’re a whipping, pretty much all the way around: taxes, insurance, utilities, maintenance.

I’ve heard of energy bills running $1900-$2,000 + in the summer months for say between a 7,000 and 7,500 square foot house.

TO C.R.:
I looked at solar panels to put on my new hope-to-be 3500 sq ft LEED home and found that it would take roughly 40 years to pay back the minimum of $30K cost. Because my house will be super energy efficient anyway, I think the solar panels will only allow me to save somewhere around $1800/year. The folks at Current Energy were extremely helpful.

Unfortunately Dallas has no incentives for solar panels and the federal incentives are minimal. If we lived in Austin my solar panel costs would be roughly 1/2 or 1/3 of what I would pay in Dallas - Austin heavily subsidizes alternative energies.

The cost of solar panels will drop dramatically in the next 5-10 years because the primary cost-driver (the silicon) is in relatively short supply. There are at least three new plants being opened (England, US and China) to manufacture the silicon for the panels. So I’m laying the electrical lines in my roof to be ready for when the panels become cost effective.

Until then, I’m installing double and triple paned windows and doors, using full-house encapsulation insulation, a 21 SEER A/C unit, and other energy-savings methods.

You can get solar panels that aren’t $30,000 a pop. You can use them to generate enough power to totally power certain systems in your house, and you can sell back excess juice to the electric company. As far as I knew, there were subsidies for solar panels–federal subsidies are not “minimal” but they don’t totally cover it either. I could have sworn that there were local subsidies. Point is, the cost is coming down, and predicted to drop even more in 2009. The key to making these things work is to generate and store enough power that you can sell it back to energy companies: the same goes for wind power, if you want to erect windmills on your property (if you legally can).

Wow, that is SO impressive. We must all bow to the glorious wealth and power it must require to have a monument to one’s ego that requires $1400 a month to cool. How proud your parents must be.

Hey Candy…

Yep…I understand completely. I just got my bill and it is right at $500 even though we took extreme measures to try and save after last months bill. Turning everything up to 85 degrees when we aren’t home and leaving the house practically dark at night resulted in a bill that was $30 more than last months. Geeeezzzz.