Gas bill and usage - Southern Walk

I've always wanted Bob Ryan's job

Are you also a participant at Weathermatrix? (http://www.weathermatrix.net/) Where did you purchase your weather station?

 

That kicks butt! I like watching the weather too. You are my new hero.

 

Yeah I decided to "redo my office" during this time and it was taken offline. I will make sure these kind of outages don't occur again

Dutchml - I bought mine new from one of the online vendors on Ebay. I am not a member of Weathermatrix. I'll check it out though. Thanks for the info!

 

LOL Just wait until the next thunderstorm and you can watch the Precipition amounts increase. Its very exciting!

 

Sorry to get you all off the weather topic---but back to gas.

We have a Spruce and I guess we'd better get a programmable thermostat! Contrary to T8erman's earlier ppppossst--we do pay
our gas bills and ours was $411 in January. And--what's truly
frightening--we keep both floors between 67-68 degrees and don't
run the fireplace. YIKES. I'm jealous of the folks with the
$300 bills.

BTW--We, too, can feel the breeze coming in around most windows.
Our home inspector said they are just crappy windows and that they're
poorly insulated.

 

I've actually heard it may be cheaper to run the fireplace more frequently, which produces more heat and doesn't require the Central Heat to kick on as often. Burning gas is less costly than running an entire HVAC system? Sounds good to me- my wife will use any excuse to keep the fireplace burning...

DcD

- - - - - - - - -
iPod 30GB
What are YOU listening to?

 

We also live in a Spruce and out gas bill was $330 in January, we keep the thermostat at between 66 to 74 degrees depending on the time of day or nite and have not used the fireplace. Try keeping your bedroom doors upstairs open so that the heat from the ground floor will flow in instead of just staying by the cieling, you'd notice that the upstairs heater will be running a lot less.

 

If you do not use your gas fireplace that often, you can also save some money by turning off its pilot light.

 

I had only been watching this thread with general curiousity and then...I got my recent gas bill. We are in a Spruce, rarely use our fireplace, and our gas bill more than doubled this past month! We have not made any changes to our thermostat so we were pretty shocked. We had been averaging about $240 and this most recent bill is $571! I am flabbergasted and unless Tripod my three legged wonder has figured out how to turn on the fireplace during the day while we're at work, it doesn't sound right to me. I do plan on calling the gas company and questioning this increase.

 

Two things:

1. What was the $240 last month based on? Actual reading or an estimate? If it was an estimate, the $571 is probably partially attributable to catching up on last month's actual usage.

2. It doesn't matter if you don't move your thermostat. When it gets colder outside, your furnace has to work harder to keep the same temperature. It clearly has been colder recently, so an increase should not seem that far fetched.

 

hmmm...it seems that our previous bills were estimates and this recent one is based on an actual reading. harumph...you think they could get the estimates closer...

Anyone else here ready for Spring?

 

Looks like we have finally turned the corner on gas usage for the winter: I just checked our bill online, and our bill went from about $300 for gas used in January to $223 for gas used in February. All other factors were the same for us over these 2 months (programmable thermostat settings, etc.).

I would think that most of you should also see a decrease in your gas bill this month.