Anyone else have a ridiculous electric bill?

[littlesmokey]

....Glad my stove is not on a thermostat.

I was wondering.....why?

Not having this as an option, let me say..... A thermostat requires the stove to cycle on and off. It would maintain a constant burn if not automatic. The ignitor and high/low run of the stove uses more electricity. How much, I don't know, but the ignitor alone is a large current draw.

Just my thoughts.

 

[MainePellethead]

Bingo BJN!! My argument all along ... I am not against windpower.....but let US benefit. I know people in Aroostook County and they have not seen the results they were promised.

Doesn't take much for usage here in Maine to get a high bill. We pay 20 cents a kilowatt hour. All the special interest groups have made the competition
go away. " Maine, The Way Life Should Be", if you can afford it.

But yet we welcome all these new wind power projects, send the power out of state and don't get a dam thing for it other than a bunch of hacked up mountain ranges. Makes you wonder who's running this state.

Sorry for the off topic rant.

 

[MainePellethead]

My light bill is barely noticeable with stove running...... and I run it 24/7

 

[cac4]

....Glad my stove is not on a thermostat.

I was wondering.....why?

Not having this as an option, let me say..... A thermostat requires the stove to cycle on and off. It would maintain a constant burn if not automatic. The ignitor and high/low run of the stove uses more electricity. How much, I don't know, but the ignitor alone is a large current draw.

Just my thoughts.

well...depends on the stove. With the Harman "room temp" mode, the stove adjusts itself to match the heat load on the house; it doesn't cycle on and off. except in the "shoulder seasons", when the demand is too low for the stove to match. You can switch it to manual mode, where it'll just run as slow as it possibly can, without shutting down. but that will give off more heat than you need, so you'd be wasting pellets, instead of electricity. It would be really hard to determine which costs more (running the ignitor vs. pellets wasted in "maintenance burn".)

 

[kbrown]

DVR's... I heard that DVR's use alot of energy because it is always on. Did you get one of those?

I have a Kill-a-Watt Unit and was surprised to see that the DVR's use 45 watts each and must remain on to record shows. This is the reason why we installed Solar Panel this past spring. It made a huge difference in my electric bill. My Bill for Aug 08 was $450.00 my bill for Aug 09 (Post Solar Panels) was $120.00.

Just wondering what type of solar panel you installed and what the ROI is on something like that.

 

[tjnamtiw]

Also, can you tell us how you tied it into your home system? How much did that cost?