Just a 46-year-old mom of 2 in Northern California. My kids are Monkey Monkey(MM) and Drama Llama (DL). I am married to Monkey Hubby (MH). Well, um, I did Fern's energy test thing last week I guess? & it said 94% of US households use more energy than us. I found that quite impressive considering there are 4 of us, we wash diapers and cook every day and someone is always home, etc.
On the flip side I wasn't terribly surprised because our house has a lot of energy efficient features (roof, insulation, windows, etc., etc.) and we have all CFLs throughout the home and all new energy saving appliances. We can easily go 1/3 the year if not 1/2 without turning on the heat and air either (Because of all the energy saving features AND milder weather here).
Anyway, I just go our bill and expected it to be dirt cheap since we were all gone one week this month. We barely used any electricity all of last week with the fam gone. BUT instead the bill would have been $60 after tax ($45 for the energy usage). Yikes! It was bigger than I expected - I expected more like $25 tax and all - if that.
The bill said we used 6 times as much electricity as we did the same time last year. & looking at the little graph of our electricity over the last year - gosh it looks awfully higher than usual this year.
I remembered that they were having problems with our meter and fixed it in March, right around a/c time, and our bills seemed a little higher than usual. So whatever. Maybe we were a but under billed.
BUT I mean our bills last Oct., Nov., Dec. were less than $20 each. LOL. (At least $15 of that is taxes & fees!!!!!!).
So, um we are on budget billing of $54/month now and I now realize this is not terribly realistic. This bill should have been the lowest of the low and it was $60!!
I have the feeling this figure will be raised with time. Won't get to used to it.
At this rate I would project our budget billing to be about $75/month.
To be fair we pay an extra $6/month for green energy, voluntarily. So will put our combined gas & electric around $100/month. Considering the size of our house, all that we do with people home all the time, etc., I still think this is rather impressive. But I think our 94% # is a bit inflated. 
I'll probably wait for a whole year of corrected billing and try that again. See where we really stand.
Oh yeah the other funny thing is I saw last night something about unplugging all your computers and game systems would save you $20/month in electricity. I had to laugh. My dad is an engineer and told me this was a big pile of BS a while back (we were asking about cell phone chargers - unplugging them). Anyway, I was like, if my bill went down $20/month it would be $0. are they kidding? Well, even with a $45 bill, I still don't buy it. But it makes a tad more sense today.
YEah we did unplug our cell phone chargers and all we got is a big bill. Yeesh.
But yeah, looking at our bills last fall I totally see why the electric company came out and thought something was wrong. I used to just look at the bill total, and they have always been rather low. But yeah, they were obviously under the realm of reasonable once you consider all we were really paying was the service charge, greenergy charge and taxes. I think we were lucky they didn't go back and charge us for under-billed electricity in the past. I have no idea what is up with that.
But now we have a challenge to reduce our electricity. We suddenly have much more room for improvement.
Bummer on the electric Bill...
November 7th, 2007 at 05:32 pm
November 7th, 2007 at 05:42 pm 1194457346
They did this on myth busters on TV, and the electric usage DID go down. We keep ours unplugged, esp the computers, microwave, TV--things that have an instant on feature or clock or light. They are always burning electric. I think if I touch it, and its warm, then it has current in it.
November 7th, 2007 at 06:00 pm 1194458407
So has your bill gone down???
My dad had some long scientific explanation for the fallacy in the argument that I could not recreate - for sure. To be fair - we only talked cell phone chargers. Our bill certainly did not go down when we tried. OTher things might be very different. We have not tried the computer and all that stuff - but I don't think 50% of our bill is the computer plugged in. Truth might be somewhere in the middle.
As such I would love to hear actual % in bill decreases people find with these efforts. Curious...
November 7th, 2007 at 07:04 pm 1194462271
I doubt it is 20$, but it is prolly something..cause I can tell in the electric bill when my husband is overly lax in unplugging the cable and computer, and router.
'course not being an electrician, I have no idea what sort of contraption is needed to see what an item 'pulls'.