Chasing Power

In reply to Toyman! :

That emporia power monitor is neat. I may have to get one eventually.

If I was at your house for a high bill complaint, large appliances is where to usually look for unexpected usage. You said your freezer is new, how old is the refrigerator? Is it around 10 years? I would also be suspicious of the antique refrigerator. I would put an amp probe on one leg going into your breaker box. Then shut breakers off until you see a fairly big drop, then go to the other leg and do the same thing. Lights, fans and other small stuff like that add up but not usually enough to notice much of a difference

Ceiling fans, one in each bedroom, one in the living room, one in the dining room. Living room and dining room spread pellet stove in the winter and AC in the summer. Bedrooms just need moving air. 

Vent fan in my bathroom is in the ceiling and just exhausts to the garage. Standalone light switch activated, it can't even clear the steam out of a 4x6x6.5 room in an hour, so runs constantly. Yes, sucking hot air out mildly defeats the purpose of the heater, but a cold wet bathroom sucks way more than a warm dry bathroom on winter mornings. 

Other fan in my bedroom is a grow tent exhaust fan hooked to a charcoal filter. 25 watts. In the winter this helps take care of the smoke from me and the wife letting us keep the windows closed, because we only smoke in our bedroom. 

Dehumidifiers keep the basement under 50% humidity. The block walls leak, when it rains or snow melts the garage and basement floors get wet. Winter isn't bad, they only need emptied once a week, spring/summer I empty both twice a day minimum. 

These are things that really have not changed in the 2.5 years we've lived here though, considered to me to be static/baseline usage. 

Isn't a bathroom exhaust fan not exhausting to the outside a code violation in most places?  Weird that they dump it to the garage but it sounds kind of par for the course with this house.

You could definitely have a fan or some other electric motor that is not in good health pulling more power than it would in ye olden days of lower electric bills.

Trying to be nice and not snarky so maybe just try measuring all of the wattage used by all of these running things that you don't want to turn off and maybe you'll find a smoking gun.  It sounds like you have a lot of stuff running all of the time for reasons.

Since you've already talked to the power company, it seems unlikely that something like this wasn't mentioned if it's available, but our company (DTE in SE Michigan) offers two levels of power monitoring.  The free one sounds similar to what you're getting.  They also have a setup that stores electrical use every minute.  On that, I can see a 1500 kW spike when a heater goes on or when the oven or microwave is on, etc.  It requires a smart meter, and then when a year subscription is signed up (I think it was about $130), they sent out a small box that communicates wirelessly to the meter and connects to the internet through the house wifi.  We got it when we added solar, but it's really usefull for seeing the impact of individual events or activities.  Here's an image of the phone app from earlier today.  The spike at 11:13 was from the air frier.  (The section of arc with no data was from us reconfiguring our home network today.)

In reply to pkingham (Forum Supporter) :

I'm digging that circular display, that's cool.