Our electric bill has been running pretty high even though it hasn’t been that cold and we’ve been supplementing with wood heat. Decided to track down the culprit and hooked up an energy usage monitor to one of our 5 sub panels. Gonna check the other 4 over the course of the next few days.

  • karpintero@lemmy.world
    8·
    6 hours ago

    A bit curious about the 5 sub panels. Did you just need a lot of separate circuits? Is the main 200A? Good luck getting to the bottom of it.

    • tenacious_mucus
      4·
      3 hours ago

      That’s what I was thinking, too. 5 subpanels for an average residential home is pretty huge. 2-3 is still okay for a 150-200a service, but 5…that’s a lot of circuits….

      • varyingExpertise@feddit.orgEnglish
        11·
        47 minutes ago

        One in the carport, one in the workshop, one on each floor of the house - that’s five plus the new panel I’m putting up for the greenhouse, not that many, imho. I just like clean infrastructure and hate core drilling concrete more than necessary.

        • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
          1·
          16 minutes ago

          One on each floor of the house is insane, why do you need breakers everywhere?

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    5 hours ago

    How much of your electricity bill is electricity usage though?

    I would not be shocked if something like 40% of the bill is fees or connection charges.

    • Xatolos@reddthat.com
      2·
      4 hours ago

      Only 40%?

      When I lived in a smaller town, my electric bill was 80% of fees and connection charges.

  • metaStatic@kbin.earth
    14·
    7 hours ago

    is the power company even checking the meter?

    My parents go solar panels and it didn’t affect their bill at all. Turns out the power company was just charging an average based on previous years, I said find a better provider or start mining bitcoin.

    • ColdmoonEnglish
      1·
      31 minutes ago

      The power company didn’t choose that. Your parents did, and then forgot to call and switch to a solar-friendly or monthly-usage based rate structure.

  • Darkassassin07@lemmy.caEnglish
    61·
    4 hours ago

    If you want to expand your energy monitoring, I highly recommend an Iotawatt

    Monitor up to 14 circuits at once, with a nice little web interface hosted on the device. You can view the data there, or have it automatically upload to your own database to be displayed with other tools like grafana (if you’re into selfhosting)