One more thing... you might just call your electric company and ask. There may be discounts that they give to multi-unit buildings that you're not aware of. They might also be able to give you historical usage data for your address to compare.

It's rare, but there could also be some bad wiring somewhere that is causing a power bleed. You can try unplugging ALL of your appliances, and shutting off all lights and checking to see if your meter still moves. If so, contact your landlord and let him know, because it'll be his responsibility to get an electrician out to check the wiring.

Also, make sure you are comparing KW-hr usage, not the total of the cost of the bills. Another thing to do is to look and see if the disc in the electric meter is rotating when you have everything in the house turned off or unplugged.
The "kill-a-watt" meter is a cheap useful watt meter that you can use to check the electrical use of individual items that can be plugged into it.

Thanks for all the helpful suggestions. Yeah, I should indeed compare kwh used versus an old bill. Unfortunately I don't have any of those lying around, but I'll call PG&E to see about that. Still seems unusual for me to be crowding the so-called "baseline" with my minimal usage of lighting.

The AC simply can't be the culprit. 12 hours in the last month, if that cost $20 then that would say someone who ran it all the time in (say) LA would pay $1200 / month for their AC. The dryer is a possibility, but it would be hard to measure its usage because of the unusual plug. I will look into getting a device by which I could measure the fridge. Standby power for my consumer electronics is the same as the apartment, I'm absolutely sure no modes were changed. Maybe I need to have PG&E come out to do an energy audit of the house.

Figure out how many kwh you use per month, this should be on your bill.

Buy the kill-o-watt meter or something similar, it should be about $30, start taking measurements giving each appliance a day or so to run.

Throw the results into a spreadsheet and see what percentage of your usage it covers when spread across the month. Don't be surprised that you can't find it all. Some appliances can't be measured with the cheap meters. I'm guessing something like 30% of my usage goes to electric hotwater and can't measure it directly because it's 220.

For hardwired items you'll have to guess how much they are using, lights are simple. Watts x time used. but things like doorbells and motion sensors on lights and so on are a guess at best.

Once you figure out where the problems are start looking into cheaper replacements.

You mentioned a 60 Watt and a 300 watt light. I have 13 watt bulbs inside which are fine for me to read by but I also have 27 watt flood lamps on the outside of my house. 6 of these use less power then 1 of the bulbs I replaced with them and they light up my entire front yard quite nicely.

I believe I'm using about 12 kwh / day. So that's like 500 watts of something running 24x7. Hard to believe really. In the apartment it was more like 7 kwh / day, I think (checking with PG&E). 13 watts would be pretty hard to read by for me (my eyes can't see well in dim light), unless it was some new technology like an LCD bulb.

Check to see if the hot water system has an electric immersion heater in the tank as a booster - and if so switch it off.

Look at the washing machine and find out if it has a hot water feed or only cold water - if only cold it is using electricity to heat the water instead of your low cost gas.

HTH

I think the 13 watt CFL (Compact Fluorescent Lights) lights were to replace the 60 w incandescent bulbs. The 27 Watt CFL floodlight should be good to read by.

Also look over your bill and see if it is an estimate..and not an actual..mine is actual every 3 months and in the winter that hurts cause they estimate for 2 months and then they reall catch up to you..they could have done the estimate on the person who had the house before you..

Check your fridge to see if it is a frost-free unit, which uses much more electricity.

I actually have two different types of 13 watt CFL in house, most of them are a nice off white light that is very close to a 60 watt regular bulb. A couple of them are super white though, the light isn't soft coming out of them but they are really good over the stove to help me see the food colors and so on really well. the floodlight would be a lot to read from, you can get a lot of different CFL wattages these days, my dad has a 80 watt CFL in his shop, expensive little bugger but it's ungodly bright.

I don't know what type of bulb our 300 watt reading light is. I have a 400 watt incandecant bulb in a home built projector, it would blind you to look directly at. It lights up my entire living room and when you take the top off the projector it looks like that part in raiders of the lost ark where they open the ark.

I hadn't thought about the averaging of prices but definitely look at the bill to see if thats what they are doing, when I moved into a place a few years back they did that and for the first year they had me paying way more then I was actually using, I got a big credit back at the end of the year and they cut the payments in half.

"It's $40"

Bah.. After replacing my ancient heatpump with a 17 SEER unit my monthly average has gone from $180 to $140.

$40! Never heard of a bill so low...

Small (1600 sq ft) place, and California weather...

What brand/model? I hate the pure-white light from fluorescent bulbs.



It's a lamp with three 100-watt bulbs and a switch that can turn 1, 2, or all 3 on. With my vision I really need the light of all three to see well enough to read.

The unusual plug on your dryers is because its 240V not 120. Don't try sticking a kill -a - watt on that! Just look on the dryer for the rated amps. multiply that by 2 to get your amps at 120V. In other words 8 amps@240V = 16 amps@120V

Then do this
amps x volts (120) x hours (per month that dryer is on) - that will tell you how many Kwh your dryer uses per month.

-G

You can now get CFLs in different "color temperatures". The lower the color temperature (in degrees Kelvin) the bulb, the "warmer" the tone will be. Basically, it will be shifted toward the red end of the spectrum instead of the blue.

Check out THIS PAGEfor some CFLs in the brightness range you are looking for, but with different color temperatures. At the top of each listing, you will see a number "##K", which indicates its color temperature/100. So "51K" = 5100 Kelvin color temperature. If you like warmer tones, I would stay near the 5000 mark. Those bulbs also say "warm white" in the details.