$200/month is much less than many people pay who own a home. It's $.25/kwh just for supply right now. That means at 400 kwh, your supply would be $100. Plus, you'll have to pay all the additional fees which would add up to about another $70-80, so close to $200. If someone has electric baseboard heaters, electric stove, and works from home, they'll easily use 400 kwh in a month.

>but a very important test when you find you used a shit ton of power and like you did is to turn everything off

Never even thought of this! Thank you for the suggestion. I really appreciate it.

Good to know. I'll see how my bill changes after they switch out my meter and have them come check if needed.

We currently have the old meter from when they had different rates throughout the day and I don't know how to read it and no one at NG seems to know how to read it. After complaining for months when our bill was over 1000 kwh, it suddenly went down by 200ish kwh with no change on our end. So, I'm hoping this new meter will allow me to keep track of our usage and keep NG honest. And if needed, we'll pay the $11/month for the manual meter. I really think it's NG charging us more than we use since we have a house, but our garage is separate so someone could have tapped in somewhere.

We wanted a wood stove, but we decided we want to get out of MA badly so we're trying to update the house and wait out the bad real estate market for now. Once prices are better, we're going to sell and get a multi family home so we can rent some of it out and have more money to invest.

$440 for 4.5 months is very low. That's less than $100/month. You either have a small house and/or don't have much that uses electricity. My cousin has radiators and not many gadgets that use electricity, so their bill is about $200/month.

Yes, I have a whole house.

You can wrap the baby in a thicker blanket or sleeper. I mean, what did people used to use before we had heat to keep our houses at 68⁰? Not saying you need to change what you do, but if you want to save money, there are ways to lower the temp and keep the baby warm.

Yes, please. If it's different, I can use that to try and lower my rate.

Our billing cycle resets in the beginning of the month, so we paid the new rate for the entire cycle.

We've thought about it, but our heat uses natural gas now so we're afraid to know how much electricity we'd use for a heat pump.

We do have a fireplace and had quite a few fires during the colder days last month, so I'm sure our bill would be higher if we hadn't. We can get the house to about 68⁰ with the fireplace and then the heat doesn't turn on until sometime the next day.

Good. Glad you won't have to deal with that.

Is there a termination fee? I saw a few that had no cancelation fee but did have an early termination fee if you tried to get out of the contract early.

I checked out some others from a link someone else provided. It seems like they get you with the auto renewal of the contract. Many contracts are a fixed price for the life of the contract, then variable pricing after the initial contract expires. So, if you have a 9 month contract at $.16/kwh, once the 9 months is up, they can charge you anything and change whenever they want.

I might still look into this, but I'll be calling them and having them send me a copy of the contract before signing up. I'd want to know how far in advance I have to say I don't want to renew, so I know if I'll end up screwed or not.

I will say 68⁰ is kind of high. We're at 65⁰ during the day and I'm thinking of lowering it 1-2⁰.

Do you at least lower it at night when you sleep?

Oh, man. So sorry to hear that. I can't imagine paying that.

I will do this. I'd just hate if we found out there wasn't insulation because then we would need to take down replace the walls. The attic was a big enough job and it was blown in insulation. We did the attic ourselves so it was a lot of work and time.

I have that on mine. I'll ask my husband if he has that setup on his. Thank you.

Yeah. We switched out the attic insulation last year and got new windows this year. The only other thing is to check the insulation in the walls, but that would require us to take down and replace the walls in pretty much every room.

Our new bill is 75 kwh less. We got our new windows the 3rd day of this newest billing cycle I'm referring to in the post.

Not sure. Do you know how you can check that?

I'll have to look through this. Thank you.

Yea

That's last months bill isn't it? I have the same supplier and the new bill is at the new rate of $.25/kwh.

Thank you! I will look into that this weekend.

I hate them so much. It took months of complaining when our bill was over 1000 kwh/month for our bill to suddenly decrease. And we have the old meter that was made for different rates at different times, so I don't know how to read the three different displays (sends readings automatically). I called and demanded they switch it out for a standard digital read and they're coming next week. If needed, I'll be demanding a manual read. I've been thinking they've been ripping us off as our usage wasn't this high in the past. The only change is we both work from home, but our computers aren't on 24/7.