If the hot water tank is leaking, the hot water is constantly being replaced by cold water, and the heating element is running 24/7 to try to keep it hot.
Your previous reading seem way too low for normal ussage. Check tje old bills to see if they were estimated, and for the period between readings. I’vw seen variances on bills from 20 to 35 days. I would say 1200 kwhrs. is the low end of a typical household going up to about 1800 during high demand periods. Check the meter weekly or daily if you need to get a handle on the usage. You can have the power company check the meter for any problems.
You can find wattage on the electric device. The wattage divided by 1,000 is the number of kwhrs. you will use in and hour of operation. That 100 watt bulb will use 1 kwhr in 10 hours. The wattage of the computer is on the power supply where the cord plugs in.
With computers however, the max wattage rated on the PSU is not necessarily the amount it will be using at all times. You can have a 600 watt powersupply but if you are running a low powered cpu and a built in video card you’re nto using much power, and even less when the machine is idle/on stand by.
Now if she has a power hungry video card several hardrives and an overclocked CPU, the machine will be using more power, but I’d wager it still won’t be using the full wattage listed on the PSU and will only get close when doing something that will really use the power hungry components of the system like gaming.
We’re very low-energy, Harmonious Discord. I compared our bills to those of my friends in the area who also live without AC and found them to be comparable. All the apartments in this area are owned by the same company and are nearly identical. My coworker who lives across the street from me pays an almost identical amount per month (slight lower due to less computers). The friends with the highest electrical usage had nearly double our usage, but they were night owls, had old kitchen appliances, had 3-4 computers running constantly (gaming computers with dual monitors), several fans, occasionally used the AC, and had a minifridge among other things.
Further, I’m a bit of an environmentalist, so I try to use natural lighting (which during this time of month, last until 8 pm) and unplug any appliances that aren’t in use. We also have energystar appliances and my dad always taught me to turn off the light as soon as you leave the room.
The energy company says that they weren’t estimates. And if they were, would it be normal to estimate for over half a year? Our December and Jan bills were so low because all of us were out of the apartment at that time. If it was just an estimate, how did they know that those months would be incredibly low compared to the other months?
To make matters more interesting, the power just hiccuped. It happened so fast that my roommate didn’t even notice it. The only reason I was able to tell that it happened was because I was watching a dvd on my computer which restarted after the power hiccup. I remember waking to a restarted computer at least once a few weeks ago, but contributed it to a program forcing a restart. I asked my neighbors, but no one else in the apartment complex noticed a restart. I asked the apartment manager about it about 15 minutes after it happened and she said that she had no idea what had caused it and that no one else had reported anything like that. The washer and dryers were still going as usual in the laundry unit right next to my apartment complex.
Verify that the 'fridge door is sealing correctly, AND that you see the light trip off iust before the door closes that last 1/2 inch. If the bulb stays on, not only to you pay to keep the bulb lit, but you also get to pay to pump the heat from the bulb out of the fridge and into the kitchen.
This is good advice, but the OP’s problem has to be something a lot bigger than this. Having the light stay on might add an extra 50W or so; kimera is seeing a long-term-average 1500W draw (up from an average of about 400W previously). 1.1kW is not easy to misplace in a small apartment; it will heat up a couple of rooms pretty noticeably, for example. The roommate’s computer has a listed peak power usage of about 900W (115V times 8A), but if it’s a reasonably new computer it should have power-saving modes and so it shouldn’t be running anywhere near peak power unless it’s fairly full of extra components and running at fairly high CPU usage all the time. (Does your roommate do a lot of gaming, or have a CPU-using “screensaver” like SETI@home? Is its cooling fan constantly pumping out lots of hot air? All the computer’s power is coming out as heat, so you should be able to guess whether it’s a problem just by feeling how hot it is.)
True but in this part of the county, most water heaters use natural gas.
kimera, could you clarify the power consumption on your microwave? Half of a 60-watt light bulb’s power output doesn’t strike me as a very effective cooking appliance.
And what city are you in? It seems odd that you’re not using a gas water heater…
Another bit on the pc’s, we have 2 machines running 24/7, during mild weather our power bill is $90 tops. They have 450W and 550W capable PSU’s respectively. PC’s rarely draw anywhere near that except when doing things like burning CD’s direct from one CD drive to another while playing battlefeild 2 on a 512M PCI-e video card with auxillary coolers. At that point you might be drawing 400W.
Most of the laptop PSU’s I have seen run in the 12-25W range, laptops are very power efficent, they have to be.
If a computer was consistently drawing 30oW + you could dry your hair with your power supply fan.
Some appartments are wired wrong with a single outlet in another appartment on your circuit. You can try flipping off breakers when neighbors are using large appliances. They’ll shut off and you have the location of the power draw, and always leave the outdoor’s outlet off, whenb you don’t need them on. Someone I knew had usuage that was ludicis. The under ground feed from the meter to the circuit panel had started to arc and there was a gap of 12 to 18 inches of missing wire. 9/10 of the ussage was to bridge the gap.
Exceptional spelling today.
The hot water heater is a good thing to check. You may either have a leak, or a hot water faucet is dripping which is causing the heater to keep on heating.
There is also the possibility that your power is being stolen. A neighbour could steal your power by breaking through their wall and tapping into one of your existing outlets from the back. Are your neighbours trustworthy? Going through the individual breakers may tell you which outlet may have been compromised. Do you have access to the circuit breaker panel? If you can get the landlord to open the cabinet housing the meter, then you could switch off the breakers on by one, until you notice a dramatic decrease in power consumption. The big disk in the middle will turn slower when the power decreases.
This guy suggests:
I would check the meter daily at the same time, and see if ussage is even or largely varies day to day.
I agree with you completely. This amount of energy use given the facts of the OP is almost insane.
I think the computer issue is a red herring. Most computers are not long-term using the maximum draw on their power supplies, otherwise you would indeed be feeling the heat - and I can’t imagine the computer would like it either. Hell, when the CPU maxes out on my 25W laptop when I do a one-hour boiler analysis I can feel the temperature increase in the area.
I’m suspecting one of a few things:
- Bad meter (it happens - my meter died once for a month, and I got free electricity. A friend of mine had a meter that was about 50% too high).
- A seriously fucked-up appliance, such as an electric water heater or refrigerator (kudos to Annie-Xmas). A leaking/fucked-up water heater can draw a lot of power, and huge unexplained power loss is one of the symptoms.
- “User error” (meaning, all facts might not be in evidence)
- Deliberate theft.
- Unintentional theft - This actually happened to me in my apartment at University - the apartments had been wired up in a seriously stupid manner by an electrician, such that all the power used by just the air conditioner of the apartment above ours was being tapped off of our line, downstream of the meter. I noticed this when I checked the meter and saw it was spinning like a rotary cut-off tool even though there was not a single appliance on in my place, and I traced a large 220V line that went to the other apartment. The apartment manager denied it was the case, and finally when I forced the electric company to come out and inspect it, they found the issue.
or finally
- Your roommate has taken up MIG welding as a hobby at night.
Are you sure that they power company didn’t make a mistake? When I was in an apartment I was only using around $30 a month as well, I still do without and AC. One month I got a $180 bill. I called and asked what was up, they told me it might be a mistake, but wouldn’t check it out until the next billing cycle. The next cycle I had a huge credit. It’s possible that they don’t want to admit to making a mistake.
Looking at the power rating of a computer power supply to determine how much power it uses is not usefull. Computers with big supplies need them when there is lots of disk activitly and the graphics card is running hard. Even running games the disks will not be running all the time so the power averaged over say a half hour will be substantially less that the peak power.
Here’s a website with a fairly decent look-up chart that will let you estimate how much energy you should be using with your appliances. Ignore the “enter your state” stuff at the top; just use the reference below to determine the average watt draw of the appliances you have. You can vary the hours they have listed for the appliances where you KNOW how many hours you run them; for stuff like the refrigerator, use their default value. (It will give you an annual usage of around 600 kWh, which is the ballpark I would expect it to be in.)
My gut feeling is that there has been a mis-read of this. Getting the opportunity to get in and read the meter yourself may tell you something. It could have been misread currently; if so, if you get a current reading below what they told you it was on the bill, they you’ll know they misread it. If your current reading is a bit higher, then it’s less likely they were wrong the last time they read it. It could be that it had been mis-read (at an artificially low value) earlier, and you’re just now true-ing up to show your actual usage over a longer period of time. As others have noted, if your utility doesn’t have automatic electronic reading, sometimes the utility doesn’t read your meter every month — some times they just estimate readings for months at a time, and then you have to true it up when they finally make an actual reading.
If the reading you make is a bit higher than the last reading they have to show you, you can use that to estimate your average usage per day since the last time the meter was read. Subtract the previous reading from the current reading, and apply a multiplier if one is required. (Ask your utility rep if there should be a multiplier applied to the difference. In a lot of residential meters the multiplier is 1.0. If it’s not, your utility bill frequently prints the reading and tells you what the multiplier is.)
1.1kW “lost” power should be creating waste heat in your apartment. In fact, if it were all going to waste heat, you would notice a significant temperature increase. I’ve calculated that for a 1,000 square foot house with 10-foot ceilings, 1.1kW turning directly into heat would yield a temperature increase of 11.52 degrees Celsius per hour (that’s a 50 degree Fahrenheit increase). Obviously that’s the top end of how bad it could be, and the effect is not linear – that is, you can only sustain 50 degree increases for so long before the house starts giving up heat to the rest of the neighborhood. But even if only 10% of that wasted energy were becoming waste heat, you would definitely notice a difference: your house would easily reach 100F at night!
My vote is that this anomaly is a result of bad metering or bad wiring. Also, imagine a scenario in which your meter is one of five meters for your complex: one for each of four houses, and a “master” meter for all four houses so the owner can see the energy usage in his homes. If these are numbered 1-5 and then they get re-labeled but the records don’t change, a mix-up could leave you stuck with a bill that was roughly four times larger than it should be.
Have the air conditioner checked and see if it’s shorted any components internally. This can cause massive power draws in some cases. You can also (if accessible) direct the tech to remove the line fuses from the AC and this will put he stealing AC theory to rest for any future diagnostic work.
If the heating system is separate do the same for it.
FWIW you might also try running the AC to see if it’s operating normally.
I will say that you have an amazingly low use rate. I’m a single man who lives alone in a medium sized house with no AC on this year so far - that might change soon) and just basic appliances running- Fridge (w ice maker)- Heater- Washing machine - Dryer and my bill was $ 90 last month for 768 Kilowatt hours. I’m stunned that your normal use rates with 4 people would be so amazingly low @ 150-350 KWH per month. I thought I was energy thrifty. I use the shower once a day and wash clothes about every other day. and you’re saying your use rate was approximately 30% - 50% of mine with 4 people.
Is it at all possible that a measurement error existed before that’s now been corrected?