Our November 2013 electric bill

I received our November electric bill and am happy to say that it is the lowest it has been all year! This is even before switching to the A-TOU rate I talked about in this post. I am so excited to see our next bill with this new rate, especially with this month's bill being much lower.

Last week I went through all of my electric bills from this past year and logged them in a notebook, so I could compare our usage for the year.

The set up in my notebook looks like this:

Month:
Amount due:
Daily Usage (kWh):
Monthly Usage: 
Supply rate:
Delivery rate:

The highest it has been this year was February 2013 at $239.17! Our daily usage was 55 kWh. I am guessing we ran the furnace and dryer much more then. My husband just reminded me that we also had to run space heaters in the basement around that time when the water line froze right as it entered the house. My husband purchased a sheet of foam board insulation, dug and placed it against the foundation. We're hoping this does the trick.

Our bill for November 2013 is $107.20! Our daily usage was only 25 kWh. My goal is to get our next bill under $100, and if I can keep it that way throughout the winter it will make our plans to becoming debt-free that much quicker and easier. Every step counts. 

Here are two things I've been doing that may have contributed to this lower electric bill:

1. I rarely use the dryer (only for towels). I hang dry all our clothes...on a rack, on the shower curtain rod, over doors and chairs, pretty much anywhere I can hang clothes.

2. We've been using our woodstove as our primary heat source. We did have oil delivered, but we're going to conserve this as much as we can. We have enough wood to heat our house all winter.

We are taking a few more steps this month to lowering our bill, in addition to our new rate and supplier. Our next step is to purchase an insulation blanket for our water heater. We also need to change out a couple remaining light bulbs to CFLs.