Why is my electic bill so high?

To figure out why your electric bill is "so high", the first thing you need to do is to figure out what's normal. If your bill has spiked recently that's easy: Just look at your old bills and see how much your usage has gone up. Look only at the amount of electricity you used in kWh. Don't look at the cost, because the cost could have gone up for other reasons, such as an increase in the price of electricity itself.

If your kWh usage is similar but the cost is now higher, then the answer as to why is on your bill. Maybe the price of electricity went up, or maybe your utility company has demand charges, or maybe you're being charged for some other city services besides electricity.

Maybe your bill hasn't gone up but you just think it's always been too high? In that case the first thing you can do is to compare your usage to what's normal. A typical American family uses 850 kWh per month, as we see on the how much electricity costs page. If you're anywhere near that with a 3-person household you're normal. Normal doesn't mean good, though, since most people waste lots of energy. Personally, I use only about 99 kWh per month.

Let's say you still think there's an unknown reason why your electrical usage has been so high recently. In that case the next thing you should do is to make sure the bill you received is accurate. Once I got a bill that said I used 2617 kWh, when I normally use only 100. A quick look at the meter showed that they read the meter wrong. My bill said the starting and ending meter reads were 18,441 and 21,058. But when I got my bill checked my meter it was only at 18,567, so clearly my meter hadn't really ended on 21,058 the previous month. I called the utility and they quickly refunded the $195 they overcharged me.

If your meter matches your bill, meaning you weren't overcharged, your next step is to verify that your meter isn't running gratuitously. Shut off all the breakers and see if the meter is still spinning (or if the electronic indicators are changing, on an electronic meter). If the meter shows electric use even with the breakers turned off...

1. Is your home a duplex or some other multi-family dwelling? If so then probably at least one of your neighbor's circuits is wired into your meter. Hire an electrician to fix it.
2. If your home is a single-family dwelling and the meter still spins when everything is off/unplugged, then your meter is broken. It's highly unusual, but it's possible. In that case pay an electrician $40-50 to come out to confirm that and to sign a statement to that effect so you have proof when you go battle your electric company to get back the money they overcharged you. Videotaping it wouldn't hurt, either.

Note that the instructions at left will find leaks when wires aren't connected correctly, but it won't reveal problems where the wiring is too thin to handle a load. When the wiring is too small for what you're running then the wiring can heat up. The extra heat represents wasted energy, but more importantly, that heat can also cause a fire which can burn your house down. Unfortunately there is no easy way a homeowner can discover inadequately-sized wiring themselves. That's a job for an electrician.

If your meter stopped cold when you shut off the breakers (which is the most likely result), then the next step is to make sure the meter doesn't run when everything is turned off. That way when we start turning appliances back on to measure their use, we can be confident that we're measuring only that appliance and not some other appliance as well. To do this, turn OFF every single thing in the residence and physically UNPLUG every appliance from the wall. (Simply turning it off isn't good enough for some appliances.) The water heater might be hard-wired without a plug and in that case you'll have to just make sure it's turned off. And of course you can't unplug a central AC system so just turn it off. If you have illuminated light switches (wall switches that light up when the light switch is turned off), then remove the light bulbs from the sockets to get the switches to de-light.

Once everything is turned off and unplugged, flip the breakers back on one at a time and verify that the meter still doesn't spin. If the meter still spins and you're 100% certain you've unplugged absolutely everything that can be, and that everything else is turned off, then it's possible that you have faulty wiring which is causing an electrical leak. It's much more likely that you really failed to unplug or turn off something, but if you're sure your meter still spins with everything unplugged and turned off, then have an electrician check your home for faulty wiring. In the meantime, you can estimate the amount that your leak is costing you, by using the meter timing method. Each 100 watts that is running continuously uses about 73 kWh per month. If you're paying 15¢ per kWh, it costs you $10.95/mo. One reader found a leak that was costing them $15/mo.

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