Thanks! I did not know those existed. I cannot store them though (at least not in my place…might be able to put it in my sister’s garage 
).
Although, I am dubious of any place that will not tell me the price but encourages me to contact them for a free estimate. IMO Just give me a ballpark number on the website. We can go from there. I mean, if they wold cost $5000 then I am probably better off paying high power bills. I’ll die of old age before it moneys out.
If you live in a high rise you’re sorta screwed on improving your consumption. BTDT.
Interior window inserts as somebody said are a doable option. There is also a clear shrink-wrap product you can buy at home depot that you adhere to the window frame then hit with a hairdryer to srirnk to taut. That’s nearly free.
If you have blinds or drapes, leave them fully open when the sun is visible out the window and leave them fully closed otherwise; especially while you’re gone or sleeping or otherwise unable to enjoy the view.
Poke around the perimeter of all windows and the door to the balcony if you have one feeling for a cold spot or a draft. There are often vents to the outside someplace that you may be able to close off with some careful MacGyvering.
If you haven’t changed the furnace filters recently do that. Unless you’re allergy prone, skip the HEPA stuff and get the cheapies that flow a lot of air easily. You might also have an HVAC company come out and check the rest of the guts of the units. Enough grunge on the coils can interfere with both the AC and the heat part of the system.
Overall, roughly 2400 kWh for a month is 2400/24/30 = 3 kWh per hour. So about 45-50 cents per hour. 50 cents an hour is still $12/day.
Most household electrical devices have a label that indicate how much power they consume. For a lot of bigger appliances sold in the US that have an outsized impact on your utility bill, a standardized Energy Guide label is attached to help you understand how much it might cost to operate:
If you know how much electrical power a device consumes, you can estimate how much it costs to operate for a given length of time. To take an example, a space heater is typically 1500 watts, about the most you can pull from a standard 120V electrical outlet on a 15-amp breaker. 1500 watts is 1.5 kilowatts. Draw 1.5 kilowatts for one hour, and you’ve consumed 1.5 kWh of energy. At a cost of 15 cents per kWh, that’ll cost you 1.5 kWh * $0.15/kWh = $0.225. Twenty-two and a half cents. Do that every day, and you add $6.75 to your monthly bill.
Some things, like cell phone chargers, really are negligible. They draw maybe 10 watts, and you use them for an hour a day. So 0.01 kW * 1 hr * 30 days = 0.3 kWh, adding five cents to your monthly electrical bill. Anything that’s turned on 24/7 bears a closer look. I have a Tivo DVR that draws 40 watts continuous, 24/7. That’s about 29 kWh per month, adding about $4.30 to my monthly bill. Lots of other little things, like outside security lighting, computers that perhaps never sleep, a router, a cable modem, and so on.
A plug in power meter (e.g. a Kill-A-Watt) can be helpful in understanding the actual consumption of any given plug-in electrical device in your house. If the main heating device for your residence is hard-wired, then you can’t use a plug-in power meter on it. However, you may still be able to get a sense of how much your heating cost is by comparing an electrical bill from the dead of winter with a bill from a “shoulder” month (when the outdoor temp is about the same as the indoor temp, meaning little/no heating energy is required). Assuming your electrical consumption for everything else in your home doesn’t vary much from month to month, then the difference in those two bills can be attributed to your wintertime heating requirement.
Are there better (read more efficient and less expensive to run) electric heaters to be had?
My sense of it is no. Electric heaters all have the same efficiency when it comes to converting electricity to heat (near enough).
As an aside: I change my filters roughly every six months so they are probably not the problem.
Filters probably ought to be changed monthly. If air isn’t flowing easily, a lot of the heat you’re paying to create is spent simply heating the interior of the heater itself; it never gets anywhere useful where you can feel it.
An electric heater is two components: a resistive heater, which as you say is roughly 100% efficient, and an air distribution system. Which might be as elaborate as air ducts and register all over your unit, or as simple as a fan that blows a breeze out some louvers on the face of the HVAC unit.
Even if your building is rather deluxe, they could easily have chosen to go cheap Charlie on the heaters. Again having an HVAC crew come out for an evaluation of the size, condition, and quality of your units would be a smart early move.
Is that a typical amount for an apartment with electric heat? You use 2.5 times more power per month than we do, and we live in a large two story home. We have natural gas heat, though.
The reason it’s so hard to figure out the kWh cost is that the true kWh cost of power is completely variable. Also, if your state has mismanaged its power it may have to import power from its grid partners at the current pool price. And that can change radically.
On a sunny day here, the pool price during off-peak can be as low as $30/MW, or 3 cents per kWh. But when renewables go offline, the price can peak dramatically. We hit $1366/MW in January, and it often goes up close to $1,000. That’s $1.36/kW.
Then there are the mandates like net metering for solar owners. Around here, if you bank a kW during of-peak, you can expend it during peak times. So essentially the solar owner sells a kW to the provider when it’s only worth a few cents per kW, and that entitles them to a kW of power when it’s ten tims the price. The utilities don’t eat those losses, they pass them on to consumers as distribution fees, or rate riders, or something else. And those vary wildly.
FWIW here is my $52 power bill from last October:
It seems those heaters are murder.
Electric heating is inefficient in the sense that a thermal power plant is burning fuel (or fissioning nuclear material) to produce heat, of which only a portion (maybe 40%) arrives at your residence as electrical power. You’re paying for the fuel that’s supplied to the plant, and you’re also paying for the operation and maintenance of that plant and the distribution of the electricity to your meter. So if a plant is burning natural gas to send you electricity that you’re using for heat, you’re far better off just burning the natural gas yourself and heating your home with it. Modern residential furnaces have heating efficiencies upwards of 95%; you just need to pay for the fuel to burn in it, and the cost to have that fuel delivered to your residence.
Even if the electricity is being generated by wind/solar/hydro, you’re still paying for expensive machines to convert those energy sources into electrical power.
Electric heat is an enormous power suck, as were incandescent bulbs. Our house was loaded with 50W halogen pot lights throughout, probably 75 across the entire house. If they were all running at once that’s almost 30A of power, 3750 W of which about 3250 W were heat. Changing out to LED bulbs dropped my power bill by close to 1/3.
This is the big advantage of a heat pump. This winter we had an average temperature of 0.3C (a record high) and the COP of a heat pump at that temperature is about 3, so 1/3 of the power for the same amount of heat as electric resistive heating.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation in Excel (I was bored) …
Comparing your Winter bill with your Fall bill gives about 2077 incremental kWh in the winter.
Which roughly breaks down … with your two heaters … to 1500W/heater/hour.
Which is pretty much exactly what one would expect … IF … both heaters are running at 1500 watts … constantly.
Now, maybe they’re 240V and can produce more wattage than that, and are cycling from HI to LOW heat throughout the day, or maybe January was just ass-cold and both heaters ran all the time, but … Idunno.
But with an 1100sf unit – particularly with some measure of a ‘wall of windows --’ it’s hard to imagine that you only have 3,000 watts of electric heating in total.
Some rules of thumb would indicate a total of (as much as) 16,000 watts would be required to heat a space that size, particularly with lots of windows and/or high ceilings.
Any of this sound consistent with what you were experiencing? Does it just raise more questions than answers? 
ETA: Do you have one or two exterior walls? Do you have neighbors or conditioned space above you, below you, and on the remaining (two or three) sides of you?
While this would be better than insulation, it still doesn’t seem to me that 3kW would be enough to reasonably heat your place.
But what do I know. Less and less each day.
Setting it to low to mid sixties F and wearing a sweater would likely make a big difference, and adding a smart thermostat to turn it down at night and when you’re gone is easy-peazy.
Four walls. Two of which are windows and two are interior. The interior hallway is heated by the building.
Also, heat rises so units below me add some heat. When I leave for some days I set the thermostats to 55F. When I come home the temps tend to be around 58-62F despite much colder temperatures outside.
I put my blinds down which seem to help a little but honestly not much that I can discern.
I have smart thermostats but I keep irregular hours so they aren’t of much use for me. One night I am up till 3a and the next I am in bed by 9p.
I suspect that you might also have a decent amount of air infiltration into your unit. This brings in cold outside air that the heating system must heat to room temperature. You can use smoke tests to look for air that is blowing in from the outside, or a tissue paper can also easily detect air currents at door and windows. Also, being in a high rise there is probably a building exhaust system that continuously exhausts air out of your unit. If there is no conditioned make up air being introduced to compensate, the exhaust fan creates a negative pressure that is going to draw air in to your unit. You may not be able to control this unless you have dampers on the exhaust grill(s) in your unit. You can block them off, but at the risk of excessive moisture build up in your unit and the risk of mold. If this is the case, then sealing off paths for exterior air to provide the make up air would help, as interior air from a common corridor (which should be warmer than outside air) would then make up most of the air being exhausted from your unit.
Infiltration would also create higher cooling costs, but since you pay a set rate for the chilled water system you don’t see the variations in cost like you do with the electric bill.
Resistive heating is quick-ish to respond, so could you just tell Alexa or Siri to set heat to 60 when you go to bed or leave the house?
IIRC there was a thread somewhere around here that said it did not matter if you left your heater on to maintain (say) 68F or turned it off for a few hours and then turned it on to heat back to 68F. They said the energy to do both is about the same.
That doesn’t sound right. On what basis was that claim made? Are they claiming it takes as much energy to heat from say, 50 degrees back to 68 than it would have tasken to just maintain 68?
Heat loss is lower when the temperature differential is lower. An apartment 20 degrees above ambient will lose more energy per hour than one thast’s only 10 degrees above ambient. Basic thermodynamics. So turning off your heaters for a couple of hours then turning them back on should save you energy over just leaving them on. But maybe there are operational details I’m not getting that make this not the case in some conditions.
Yes. That is what I remember being said.
But, I cannot find the thread so quite possible entropy has worked on my brain more than I guessed.
ETA: I found this:
The truth is that it requires more energy to keep the house at its normal temperature than to heat it back to that temperature after dialing the thermostat down. Heat naturally moves to places where it’s cold. So if your heat is up, it is constantly moving from the inside of your house to the outside, even if your house is well-insulated. A home loses energy more slowly once the temperature inside drops below normal levels. The longer the house remains cold, the more energy it saves compared to the energy lost that comes when the heater is humming along at its normal temperature [sources: Department of Energy, Sierra Club]. - SOURCE
Some types of heat (in-floor radiant) take a long time to heat up the mass, but electric forced air should respond very quickly. Run an experiment! I believe Sam is right–energy is energy and if you are not maintaining 69F vs heat loss you should come out ahead.
(To be clear, I am not trying to defend any point…I am curious about the right answer so in this case I must have remembered wrong and happy to know it.)
As said, for normal electric heat, it’s all about the same. You need a heat pump for an advantage here.
However, you might try more local heat. I don’t know what your layout is, but if you spend most of the day in a single room, you might turn off the house heat and just use a small space heater. It’s exactly the same efficiency, but you aren’t heating the whole house–maybe not even the whole room.
2400 kWh seems like a crazy amount of electricity to me, but I guess you get pretty cold temps in Chicago. It’s definitely worth doing anything you can to reduce heat loss.
Are there any windows you don’t really care about (say, in a spare bedroom). Some foam inserts will be cheaper (and better) than transparent ones. They won’t look so great, but who cares if they’re out of the way.
Closing off the vents and closing the doors on unused rooms will also help.