My PGE bill is a little over 50c per kilowatt hour. Its starting to become like a second mortgage or car payment for some. Wondering what other people are paying for their power.
https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf
I know where the losses are, the house and windows are from 1980 and there is a sunroom on the house that are just huge heat sinks. We are just waiting on funds to correct that stuff. We had some awesome shade trees but they were Ash trees and fell victim to beetles and disease so we had to have them removed so they didn’t fall on the house.
We added a radiant barrier when the roof was redone in 2016. The ceiling penetrations were all sealed and all the can lights were replaced with sealed LED fixtures.
The ac is a newer variable speed high efficiency one with new ducting that was installed 3 years ago and other than needing a minor room rebalance made a big different in our electric bill.
How is your insulation between your ceiling and the roof?
A radiant barrier helps but it’s not going to be a match for fully functioning r22 batting or anything.
And you might want to consider replanting shade trees now that the old ones have been removed. Once it’s the same height as your house it puts out as much equivalent cooling as a window air conditioner, and during the summer that’s money in your bank.
And honestly, since you live in Texas and you’re paying $285 a month for electricity, looking into some sort of solar might be well worth it.
If you have a larger property like my dad did down near Austin, you could probably do a ground mounted solar install and save a lot of money on the installation which is where with current rates the majority of the costs go to installing solar.
Its got some older fiberglass in the attic but it needs to be replaced as well since it is mildly compacted. Trees are in the plan too but that is waiting on the soil to recover a bit and the temps to drop off. Solar is a long term goal for cost and backup power but that may be a next house thing depending on how long we stay here.