Why Our Heating Bill Ballooned This Winter
Published on - April 9th, 2009 (Modified on - October 5th, 2009) (by J.D. Roth) Kris and I own an old house. During the winter, the cold air seeps in through cracks in the windows and beneath gaps in the doors. We’ve done what we can to keep our heating costs low, and we make a handful of additional improvements every year, but I still feel like we’re living in a “drafty old barn” (to quote George Bailey).
Sometimes all of our hard work goes for naught. For example, we recently hired contractors to repair some rotten siding. As they were working, they discovered this:
This heating duct leads to an upstairs bedroom. Note how the duct itself has pulled away from the funnel-shaped bit beneath the floor register. There’s a two-inch gap where the hot air was escaping. For the past several months, we have essentially been heating our basement. Kris and I could have gone for years without noticing this; to see the gap, we would have to look straight up while walking down the steep basement stairs.
My heart sank when the contractor pointed out the problem. I wondered how much this had cost us.
You’ll recall that I’ve automated some of my bill payments, including our natural gas. In theory, I’m supposed to check the statements every month. In reality, I haven’t done so since I switched to automatic payments last spring. Because of this, I never knew there was a problem. Checking the statements now, however, I can see that we’ve used a lot more energy in 2009 than we did in 2008.
- January — 2008: 98.3 Therms ($124.23), 2009: 144.7 Therms ($213.07)
- February — 2008: 120.5 Therms ($156.95), 2009: 146.6 Therms ($208.23)
- March — 2008: 104.5 Therms ($133.71), 2009: 128.8 Therms ($181.36)
During the first three months of 2008, we used 323.3 Therms, which cost us $414.89 (or about $1.28 per Therm). During the first three months of this year, we used 420.1 Therms, which cost us $602.63 (or about $1.43 per Therm). We used an additional 96.8 Therms this year, an an increase of 30%. Wow. Using that cost of $1.43 per Therm, that’s an additional $138.42 we’ve paid for heat.
Here’s a screencap that shows a graph of our energy usage:
There’s no way to tell exactly how much of our increased heating bill is due to the gap in the ductwork, but my guess would be “much of it”. (I guess we’ll find out next winter.) It’s true that I’ve been working from home this year, but I worked from home in March 2008, too. And I don’t mess with the thermostat. When I’m cold, I don’t turn up the heat. I bundle up.
Once again, I’m encouraging you to learn from my mistakes. Make a periodic check of your heating and cooling system to be sure everything’s functional. And if you’ve set up automatic payments, be sure to check your statements on a regular basis.
This article is about Funny Money, House and Home, Real-Life
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LOL This reminds me of a situation my DMIL found herself in recently. Please forgive me if I get the technical stuff wrong. I know very little about HVAC.
DMIL lives in a very nice doublewide. It is set up on blocks so that there is a space between the ground and the bottom of the home. It is surrounded by (very pretty) brick skirting. DMIL paid for a very expensive HVAC system that had pipes of some sort that ran through the space underneath the home and carried the air up to the vents in her floor.
For some reason, the HVAC system never heated the house well which ticked DMIL off since she had really paid a bundle for the system.
She had an HVAC technician come in to take a look at it. Apparently, one of the pipes underneath the home had come loose leaving a large gap. The warm air was heating the space underneath the house but not much heat made it into the house.
Somehow, DMIL’s dogs had found a way to squeeze under the house and were very warm and cozy down there for most of the winter. At least someone benefited from that leak! LOL
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When my family moved to Texas when I was in middle school, we moved into a new house. I would complain that my bedroom was hot in the summer–much hotter than any of the other rooms. My dad would tell me to keep my door open and harp constantly about “cross ventilation.” I was a teenager, so I would roll my eyes and shut my door anyway. Well, after we’d lived in the house for several years, there was a problem with the A/C, and the tech went into the attic to look. Turns out the vent that went to my room had never been hooked up, and so we were air conditioning the attic. And I was vindicated. I don’t know what they spent cooling the attic, but they could have saved a bunch of money by listening to me.
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It was an unusually cold winter in this part of the world, have you factored that in to the numbersatall?
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JD,
Your calculation is confusing. When talking about increase in energy usage, you are right about the 30% increase in Therms used. Now, when you translate that to cost, you say it is $1.43 per Therm. Earlier, it was $1.28 per Therm. I agree that the message is that it cost you more to heat the house but you did not mention the fact that Natural Gas prices increased in 2008. Here’s the cost history in Oregon from my provider: https://www.nwnatural.com/CMS300/uploadedFiles/OR_WACOG.pdf
Also, your calculation of total bill divided by Therms included “fixed” costs that is the same every month such as “pipeline capacity charge”, “distribution charge”, and whatever else your utility company charges. Those should not be included in “cost per Therm”. Also, Kris is right about 2008 being colder than 2007 season.
…sorry had to say something as an Engineer. Good post anyhow, it makes one think about their energy usage.
As for automated payments, I limit this to bills that cost the same every month, like insurance, gym membership, cell phone etc.
-Charlotte
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You do need to adjust for degree days to tell if it’s the weather or a problem. You can get historical data from NOAA (sorry about the long URL).
ftp://ftp.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/htdocs/products/analysis_monitoring/cdus/degree_days/archives/Heating%20degree%20Days/weekly%20city/
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How many utility companies raised their rates this winter because of the temporary (but huge) increase in prices of oil and natural gas? I am guessing almost all of them did… Add that to the colder than normal winter… Enough said.
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I get lucky in the winter and tend to have lower bills…my turn comes in the summer. Texas is not kind in the summers, that’s for sure! I think this year will be ok, though as I’ve tried to take steps to lower my energy bills. When I moved in I talked to the apartment complex about weatherstripping. They said if I purchased the material, they would install everything for me. So I did, and they kept their end of the bargain. It was really handy, and it’s amazing how much easier it is to control the temperature in this place!
Anyway, sorry about your ducts. It’s never fun when you know you have to spend money! And I second the notion to check your statements every month! Most places won’t fix errors past 60 days, so if there is an error on something, you also run the risk of paying for their mistake because you didn’t check.
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I know what you’re talking about with having heated the basement all winter. Ouch.
We too have an older house and we’ve learned to slash the heating bill by focusing on heating people, not space. Here are some easy-to-implement tips:
http://www.diamondcutlife.org/how-to-slash-your-heating-bill/
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I’m actually dreading the SUMMER, which I find more expensive than the winter. Thanks to keeping my heat low in the winter, I find 62 degrees in the house to be “sleeveless” temperature – that’s not going to be too useful once the temperature outside starts to climb. And I can’t adapt to heat the way I adapted to cold; when the temperature goes up, I can’t breathe, which is not good for asthmatics. I wind up trapped inside by the heat – and air conditioning’s more expensive than heating, at least for me. Plus there’s paying for someone to come and do the lawn care twice a month.
(No, doing it myself isn’t an option, for health reasons.)
Cold just seems easier to adapt to: bagging windows, wrapping ducts, hanging portieres to cut drafts, a nice little woodstove … come back, winter, I miss you!
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I find it curious that you’ll spend the time to construct graphs of your heating bills, but you don’t take 5 minutes to pull up your old heating bills when it jumps nearly 100% from the previous year. A jump of $25 (from an average of $100 in the winter) would get me motivated pretty quickly.
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hey, don’t beat yourself up too much about this — the important thing is that you found it, and your graph doesn’t factor in variances in weather (was 2008 colder/warmer vs 2009?) and changes in your “comfort zone”.
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Friends of mine bought a house in Jersey and they realized recently that the house had no insulation and heating ducts upstairs!
It’s an old house so the heat blows through the walls.
Their bills are huge and the place is freezing!
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I agree that you can’t just keep turning the heat up when you’re cold, and that you should have the heat turned down when no one is home… But keep in mind that animals count in this equation! And frankly, our comfort matters too. I’d rather turn the thermostat up to 70 than have muscles that ache constantly from drafts between layers of clothes (since you can’t hermetically seal a bathrobe or sweater), and it’s not terribly safe to be preparing food/hot beverages with drape-y layers all over the place. Proper sleep in a properly warmed room is worth the “extra” expenditure, to me.
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