I was looking at my most recent utility bill & started crunching some numbers.  Now that we have a full winter in the house I can say that I'm very pleased with the energy efficiency.  That said, my nature is to second-guess myself, & I've been thinking, "I wonder what these bills would have been like if we.....".  I'm sure everyone here has done that to some extent.

So I looked at the "worst" bill of the year.  In my case, it was for December.  January was colder, but we had a lot of friends & family over around the holidays, used the fireplace more, cooked more....blah blah blah - so December was the most expensive bill.

We built a 2000 sq ft ranch with a walkout basement (unfinished right now).  We did 2x6 construction with 5.5" batts & an inch of spray foam in the cavities, plus an inch of foam board on the outside.  The insulators did spend a significant amount of time caulking studs, plates, etc. - they seemed to do a good job with that.  In addition, we did what they were calling an "attic seal" where they spray foam all of the connections - top plates, etc., and around recessed lights.  We were on a really tight deadline to get the houe done, so we never did get a blower door test done, but I know the house is pretty tight. 

Our utility bill for December was $219.  Gas was $140 (138 therms) and electric was $78 (560 kwh).  Once I started stripping out all of the fixed costs - meters, taxes, etc., I was thinking, "what if we had done something really significant, like 12" larsen truss walls or 10" sip walls or something?".  I looked at the numbers to figure out what the bills would look like if we had actually cut our heating costs in half.  We have a gas stove, gas water heater, & gas dryer, so I guesstimated (based on previous conversation with Dana1) 3/4 of the total was for heat, 1/4 for everything else.  That makes the cost of heating $105.  If I were to cut that in half, the heating cost would be $52.  Add to that the $35 for water heater, etc,, plus the $78 for electric, all the fixed costs, etc. & it would bring the bill to $167.

I guess the point is that in order to make any significant gains beyond what we have now, we probably would have had to spend significantly more.  It was interesting to see, and reassuring to me that we had a good plan

Jerkylips,
I guess the other thing to think about is that electrical consumption becomes a much larger fraction of your total yearly costs, as you build an efficient house. Lowering your total energy consumption is more easily done by more insulation, lowering you monthly bills may be best done by reducing electrical usage.
138 therms is 13.8 million btu’s of energy and costs 140$ 10 dollars per million btu’s
560 kwh *3412 btu/kwh = 1.9 million btu’s and costs 78$ 41 dollars per million btu’s
Food for thought.
Nice Job by the way.

Eric

I agree. Honestly, the elecrrical usage is higher than I would have expected. It's a new house, so all of the appliances are energy star, front loading washer, furnace has ecm variable speed fan, etc. I swapped out all of the bulbs in the house (including recessed cans) with cfls. We have a very open kitchen/living area & most nights we only have the 3 pendants over the island turned on - 3 100 watt equivalents, so basically 75 watts to light the living area. I sort of don't get it. I dont' really know what else we could do, practically, to reduce the electricity usage...

jerkylips-

Refrigerators are usually the largest single electrical user.  Is yours rated at under 400 kWh per year (on the Energy Star tag or the Energy Star website)?  No separate stand-alone freezer, correct?  Here we can borrow a "Kill a Watt" meter from the library, and I found it useful to check everything out.  The meters are also relatively cheap, if not available from your library, about $25 from Amazon.  Another significant user can be electric motors, but you have a furnace with variable speed ecm motor, so that is already first class.  Do you use any electric heaters?  They can also be a big user.  I live by myself, and used 279 kWh in both December and January, and I have an electric dryer and use electrical bathroom heaters.  However, my usage seems low relative to my neighbors.  I would suggest seeing if you can get a Kill a Watt meter and those measurements would allow you to understand what things are the big hitters.  

I have a smaller house than yours, 1600 versus 2000 sq. ft. but with a conditioned crawl space rather than a full basement.  Otherwise the construction is similar (2x6 walls, wet cellulose filled, with 2" XPS on outside).  Aren't you in New England area?  How many heating degree days?  Is your basement heated along with the house?  If your basement is heated, your heating energy use does not seem too out-of-line.  I ran heat loss calculations on my house and the actual use seems to follow the calculations pretty closely.  You do need blower door test to estimate the heat losses due to infiltration.  Seems like you need a blower door test anyway.  Costs are usually about $125 or so (I think after subsidy by utility).  The calculations let you understand where the heat losses are. 

Lee Dodge
http://www.residentialenergylaboratory.com
in a net-zero energy modified production house

My 3 biggest users of electricity that I have measured with a killawatt meter are Refrigerator at 40 kwh per month, HRV at around 27 kwh per month and coffee maker at 12 kwh per month. I should check the washer and dryer also. I had an old electric dryer freebee that died 3 months or so ago and when I stopped using it my electric bill went down about 40 kwh per month. I have a propane one now that is not quite hooked up yet. Anyway total electrical usage is running around 170 kwh per month this winter. OTOH I am single and live in a small house, I have no TV, or internet connection and the stereo system has a hard power button so it has zero standby usage. Lighting is 100% pin based CFL.
As a side note, I measured my fathers TV set up. He has a large flat screen TV , blueray, cable box and receiver, and when the TV is off and everything is in standby mode, it still uses around 120 watts of power for a whopping 86 kwh/ month. That kind of amazed me.

One of the things I am thinking of building is a powerstrip with a 6 hour mechanical timer built into it for recharging electronics since the transformers all consume power, even when your cellphone, ipod etc are not plugged into it.

Cheers,
Eric