I’m surprised that you have individual electric resistive heaters but there’s a central cold water loop for air conditioning. How old is the building? I know a lot of Chicago’s high-rise residential towers from the '50s through the '70s were all-electric, but I think they were more often electric baseboards with thru-wall air conditioners. I lived in a mid-rise near Clark and Fullerton two decades ago and that’s how it was set up. I was only there for the spring and summer though, so I didn’t have to do much heating, and I wasn’t on a corner either, so only one wall was exposed to the exterior.
In any case, an electric furnace at least has the benefit of quick recovery, same for gas forced air, and since you don’t have a demand meter (where they tack on an additional charge based on your maximum power draw), setting back the thermostat is always a good bet. Tride is right that in-floor radiant can take a long time to recover, and heat pumps need to be programmed carefully so they don’t kick on their auxiliary heat. The thermal mass of an all-concrete building could be a factor too but I think it’s still a win for setting back, especially if it’s mostly uninsulated concrete.
I don’t see a great solution though. If it were my building, I’d want to use that air conditioning loop for winter heating too. It wouldn’t even need to provide all the heating for the building, just enough to get to a good baseline, like 65 degrees, then tenants could use their electric units to boost to their desired temperature. Whether that heat would be provided by reverse-cycling the cooling system into a heat pump or by adding a boiler, I don’t know, but because electric resistive heating is so bad environmentally and financially, I’d be looking for a way to achieve something like that. It doesn’t help you right now though.
Out of curiosity how big of a problem would it be if you lived in one of these high rises, but building occupancy was low and the apartments around you had their heat turned off or turned way down to just above freezing? In that case, you might be in a big concrete heat sink.
In other words, how much does the heat from your neighbors help keep the walls warm?
The assumption is that your living space cools down (during the period when the thermostat is turned down) quickly enough so that you achieve the low indoor/outdoor temperature differential that results in a low heat loss rate. If it’s 70 inside and 20 outside when I leave for work in the morning and I set the thermostat back to 60, it’ll take several hours for the temp to get down to 60. So if I’ve got:
*5 hours during which the indoor temp averages 65, giving an average delta-T of 45
*5 hours during which the indoor temp is 60, for a delta-T of 40
*14 hours during which the indoor temp is 70, for a delta T of 50
then my heating bill might be (655 + 605 + 7014)/(7024) = 95.5% of what it would be if I left it at 70 all the time. You might lower it another 5% if you pull the same trick at night. So if your heating bill is $200, you might save $10-$20. So it works, and conserving resources is a good thing for a global citizen to do, but it’s not like you’ll be able to retire five years early by getting a smart thermostat.
I was taking care of my mother’s bills and noticed a huge jump in electricity being billed. I looked around for anything that might have been left on or shorted out but couldn’t find anything. I finally got ahold of someone who said my mother was enrolled in their “100% renewables program”. I took her off of that and the bills went back to normal.
While that’s interesting, @Dr.Strangelove’s case turned out not to be about higher rates or unanticipated fees, which is what your mother’s case probably was.
It was just unexpected high consumption at the expected rates.
But if you turn your thermostat down to 60, your energy consumption is zero until the temp hits 60. The longer that takes, the better.
The real question is whether you would consume enough energy to re-heat the apartment to 70 than the energy you saved having the heat off while the temperature dropped plus the steady state energy cost at the lower temperature.
That really shouldn’t ever be the case, but I can leave the door open for some weird situations, such as the heater being way less efficient at full blast than at the level needed for maintenance or something.
Unfortunately for me, my peak rates actually are approaching $0.65/kWh (actually $0.53, but creeping up every month). Thankfully I have minimal heating needs. I have a similar sized place and use 477 kWh/mo (including EV charging).
When I was in university, we rent the 2nd floor of a century old building in downtown London, Ontario. When we signed the lease, there was a hair salon downstairs which was obviously well heated. By the time we moved in, the hair salon had closed and the heat was turned down to the bare minimum. We were more than shocked to see our first hydro bill with only baseboard heat to keep us warm!
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. You share the cost to warm the walls with the apartments around you. If those apartments are empty with the heat turned down it makes sense that it would drive your own heating costs up. I just don’t know by how much.
holy moly - you have a consumption of nearly 2400kw/h per month … we are around 150kw/h in a stand-alone-house with 5 habitants … yours is about 15x that … are you sure that this is correct?
That’s pretty hard to believe. Just the refrigerator is likely to take 70 kWh/mo. Even just a handful of lights and electronics will easily push past the remaining amount. It’s only 208 W on average.
2400 kWh/mo is indeed a heck of a lot, but I’m a single inhabitant and find it hard to go below 300 kWh/mo, despite having gas water/stove and having almost no heating/cooling needs.
Fridge/freezer: 26kwh
chest freezer: 15kwh
(both per “environmental sticker” on them - iow that is a real avg. monthly consumption figure, not some boileplate max. consumption)
all lights LED, we have 1 32" tv set (hardly used) and 5 notebook computers …1 microwave (maybe 10 min x day), 1 air-fryer (10m x day), electric water kettle (5m x day) and my stereo-set … and I have 4 perimeter lights on all night (4 x 10w LEDs) …
(i did set up our 190m2 house for PV - solar (which I never implemented as our electricity bill was so low at around $15 per month, so payback would have been around the year 2525)
when the kids (now teens) were small, we had regularly months below 100kwh of consumption.
here a snipplet of my bill (spanish, but you will get the idea):
Well, that is impressively low (sorry for doubting you).
I would have to unplug a ton of stuff to get to that level. I’m actually pretty careful about vampire drains, but I have a lot of devices, and 5 or 10 watts here and there add up.
depending on differentiated rates, you could “game” the system a bit (esp. if you have good insulation) … by overheating the appt. with cheap energy, and then trying to “coast” as long as possible through the high-rate-period.
I have minimal heating needs (unlike the OP), but ironically my computer is probably the single biggest contributor to on-peak rates. I’m using it all day and it’s a hefty system, about 200 W. Been thinking of time-shifting the usage to off-peak via battery pack.
I wish I could use my EV for this! It already has a giant battery and can charge overnight.
no problems … and just put the misc. audio and video junk on those “power-strips” so you can turn on/off all your A/V junk and not have it suck you dry all day (I have mine on a WIFI-wall-plug so I can turn them on from my cel).
Where you could spend some serious coin (which really makes a dent in your bill) is a good modern fridge - but then again your environment looks new, so it should not be too bad.
I conciously chose those high-$$$-drains that cycle on/off (fridge/freezer) to be very efficient and paid a bit extra for lower consumption appliances.
Don’t you have those traffic-light stickers on electric appliances in the US? …
generic pic (this one is rated at 16.3kwh x month):
ps: having lived in Urbana/Champaign for a year, I CAN attest to "it can get forking cold in this corner of the world
We have the EnergyStar logo, which has similar information. American fridges do tend to be quite large, which doesn’t help. Searching on the EnergyStar site, the best non-compact fridge they show uses 546 kWh/yr, or 45 kWh/mo. So a fair amount more than yours. But it’s 775 liters, which I’d guess is on the large side in comparison
150 kWh per month is very impressive for a family, kudos to you Al128. That’s my average wintertime electricity usage, and I’m single living in an apartment that doesn’t even have 240 volt service. So my power use doesn’t include any exterior lighting, laundry, heat/hot water (central boiler), or stove/oven (gas). It’s just some LED lights, two ceiling fans (that I do leave on 24/7), various chargers/clocks, a brand new refrigerator (32 kWh per month according to the Energy Star rating), microwave, and my computer. It is a desktop, so the idle power draw is 140W while full-load is 240W (it’s a Mac Studio so it’s much more power efficient than my prior Intel-based Macs), but I shut it down at the power strip overnight and it sleeps during the day. The internet modem and wi-fi router run all the time at 25W. So I guess it’s just a lot of little things that add up. June through September however is 600-750 kWh per month due to air conditioning, because my building is 110 year old uninsulated brick that gets slammed by the evening sun. If the heating load is 3X the cooling load, that’s not far from Whack-a-Mole’s 2,364 kWh.
