“Your new bill is available online”

Seeing that email subject line this month filled my heart with dread. It’s been an unusually cold month(at least for where I live!), and the heat pump has been running an awful lot even to keep the house at 65 or less(62 or 63 at night). I was pretty sure that the bill was going to be $400 or more.

But, the bill is “only” $367.63. I don’t know what’s more sad…that it’s possible to rack up a bill like that when your house is never above 65, or that I can even consider putting an “only” in front of that number! Sigh. I really miss our lower rates. Back in the day, a high winter bill was $120, and now even in months when we use no heat or AC our bill isn’t that low.

We did save up $450 to use for the winter bills, though, which was enough to cover us for three months of $350 bills(we budget $200 a month already, so for each $350 month we need to take $150 out of our savings). Last month, though, our bill was $273, and so I only had to take $73 out of our savings. This month, I’ll have to take $167 out, and that will leave us with $210 in our electricity savings account.

If our February bill is $350, our savings account will be down to only $60. March is normally not quite so cold, so I expect that the $60 left in the account will be enough to cover the bill for that month. Soo, unless we get some unusually warm weather, it looks like our electricity savings account will be down to $0 by the beginning of April(which is when we’ll probably have low bills and be able to start saving again).

While I’m on the topic of electricity, I thought I’d update you on my whining about the cold. When I wrote that post, it was really, really cold here. Like, in the single digits, which is VERY cold for this area. When it’s that cold outside, the house starts to feel colder, even though the thermostat is set at the same level. Happily, it hasn’t been quite that cold ever since, so I’m feeling a tad more cheerful about living in a 65 degree house.

In addition, I’ve taken the advice of several readers and I’ve been eating more hot foods-hot oatmeal for breakfast, hot leftovers at lunch, and hot tea in between-and it definitely helps me feel better. Some days(the kind where I’m running around the house a lot) I’m even managing to leave the house at 63 for part of the day(maybe, just maybe our February bill won’t be so bad?).

I’m also feeling slightly more optimistic now that January is over. February is a short month, and then in March it usually starts to warm up a bit. It’s not shorts weather or anything, but at least the single digits should be long gone by then.

How have your winter utility bills been so far?