Just opened my natural gas bill for 12/2 - 1/5. Last month (11/1 - 12/1) it was $59.75. I thought that was pretty high, so we tightened our belts and really tried to cut our usage for this next bill. As you can imagine, I just about crapped my pants when I opened it this evening and the bill was $99.08!
Last billing cycle we used right around 60 therms, this cycle was 106. Yeowch. Our rate is 35 cents/therm up to 82 therms, 54 cents/therm after that.
I'm not sure what normal usage is because we have never had natural gas before.
We live in a 975 sq ft apartment that was built in the 90s, remodeled less than a year ago (superficial only, I think. The walls seem to be pretty thin - if I touch an exterior wall it feels ice cold, no matter the temperature inside. So there's nothing we can do to improve the efficiency of our unit (huge management company won't do anything either as they're not the ones paying the heating bills). We have gas heat, cooking, and hot water. The water heater is located in a utility closet on our patio, so I'm sure that's just about as inefficient as it can get. The water temp was also set really high until just a few days ago when we had them adjust it. This could be a factor in our high bill.
During this last billing cycle, we also all got hit with norovirus. The 1.5 year old refused to puke into a bowl, opting instead for clothing, bedding, couch cushions, etc. Family who live close have a newborn, so we didn't want to take any chances of spreading it. We washed everything that could have possibly been contaminated. I know this greatly increased our hot water usage for about a week as we cycled through all that laundry.
Things we are doing to reduce our consumption:
Lower water heater temp, like I said. This was also a safety concern for our 1.5 year old I checked the temp of the hot water as it was filling my washer once and it was 150!!! Haven't checked it since lowering though.
Reduce hot water consumption - turning water off while I am in the shower and soaping up, trying to do fewer loads of laundry and dishwasher cycles, no running water while hand washing dishes, etc
Lowered thermostat from 72 to 68 degrees, we turn off heat at night or set it to 55 - we actually started doing this at the beginning of last billing cycle so I thought we would save money this time around. Nope. Lowering the thermostat more would take us into the territory of misery, as I have been tempted quite a few times to turn it up just as it is.
Making sure we don't leave the oven to preheat for too long, not leaving water to boil more than necessary. This is probably small change, and any gas spent on cooking food for ourselves is still saving us money over buying prepared food (although we never buy prepared food anyway).
It has cycled between extremely cold and not that bad at all. I think the average temp for the last billing cycle was just below 40. We live in northern Virginia, for context.
So how are we doing on our heating costs? Aside from the things we have already done, what else can we do to cut costs? This bill is twice as much as I was hoping it would be!
