Price of electric is… shocking

By Editor | July 27, 2022 |

Carmen Ensinger

I know it’s been a while since I’ve done this column and while I’ve thought about it many, many times I just never pulled the trigger.
But this time – I’m mad – I’ve reached that point where I’m almost obsessed. You see, I received my electric bill the other day and it almost doubled and I was not a happy camper. I pride myself on saving electricity. My AC never goes below 82 degrees and most of the time during the day it is set at 85 if I’m not at home.
I have all LED lighting in my home, I have only one tiny little freezer in the garage, I do maybe three loads of laundry a month, I have no dishwasher and I don’t go around leaving all the lights on. In other words, I’m not an electric hog by any sense of the word.
Like everyone else, I heard about Ameren’s rates going up and how everyone should expect their bills to be going up, but my bill had been around $60. In fact, my bill for June, with the AC on was a whole $69.
I have the app on my phone where Ameren gives me an alert each week telling me how much electric I have used and what my projected bill at the end of the month is going to be. So I knew my bill for July was going to be higher. In fact, it was projected to be $90. An increase, but one I could live with.
But when I logged into my account and looked at my actual bill (I have paperless billing) and saw the actual bill was $118, I almost lost it. For one thing, it was $30 more than the alert told me it was going to be. For another thing, it was almost double what my June bill was.
It was enough for me to get on the phone to Ameren and demand some answers. I have actually found out I like fighting with these companies. In fact, I’m quite good at it. Just the previous day I had taken down an internet provider a peg or two after they tried charging me for their service after I cancelled it two months prior – but that’s another story.
I had to wait 15 minutes and then, just my luck, I get a very nice lady. I was all cocked and ready to be my bad ass alter ego self and she just threw me totally off with her knowledgeable, amiable demeanor.
She explained that the alerts were just an estimate. Not sure I really believed that, but I didn’t have an argument back at the moment. If I had known, I could have gone back and looked over previous projections and compared them to the actual bill.
Then she explained the increase was due to the cost of electricity rising from 5.6 per kilowatt hour to 10.6 per kilowatt hour or something close to those figures. Anyway, it doubled.
She then told me of ways I could save energy and told me about the smart strip. I had never heard of it before. Apparently its just a fancy power strip that has the ability to cut power to the items plugged in. They are quite expensive, ranging anywhere from $20 to well over $100. Some of the more expensive ones have some of both – those that are regular and leave the appliance connected all the time and plugs that cut the power when not in use.
She told me something I did not know before – that even when an appliance isn’t in use – if it is plugged in it is drawing power. I thought I would pass it along to everyone but I found out almost everyone already knew this. How am I just now finding this out and everyone else already knew it. I was super bummed.
Ameren’s app lets you see your energy use in a variety of ways – every 15 minutes, every hour, how your usage changes based on the temperature, how your usage changes day by day, how your usage changes over a 12-month period and several other ways.
The thing I found is that the energy hog in my house is the AC. Thanks to the hourly and 15 minute things, I can see that when it is on, there is a big spike in my usage. Basically, my AC uses 1 KWH per 15 minutes when it is on and averages about 3 KWH per hour. When it is not on, I use about one half of one KWH per hour – big difference.
So, being the stubborn person I am, I decided while I wasn’t going to stop using the AC entirely, I was going to severely cut back, but just for the heck of it I was going to not use it for one day and just see how many total KWH I used that day without it.
Of course, I had to pick the hottest day of the month to do it – temps were over 100. I came home from the library – I was taking advantage of their AC – and I got home and it was 96 degrees in my house. I was determined though so I just laid down on the couch under the fan. It felt like hot air from an oven being blown on me – but I persevered – till after 2 a.m. which I figured was technically the next day so I made it through the day – then that baby went on and I cooled off.
On a typical day with the AC running, I use an average of 23 KWH of energy. The day I didn’t use the AC and survived with only a fan blowing on me, I used only 9.28 KWH of electricity, so it does make a big difference.
…to be continued
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■ Carmen Ensinger is a pet-lover and a reporter for River County News – Better Newspapers.