Um.. ouch. August 6, 2006 at 1:55 pm
For those that don’t know me.. I did some serious work on the house in July. I had a complete central air (heat and A/C) installed (which included pulling out the crappy old wall heaters, new furnace/blower, AC, ducting, the works). Then, 2 weeks later, I had my cheesy old thin, aluminum windows replaced with nice new dual-pane, e-whatever coating to cut down on heat, etc. Even had the one tiny sliding glass door in the back room redone as a window (it was too small and rarely was used anyway.. figure this is better for keeping the house heated/cooled).
I just got my first SDG&E bill the other day and for the period of 6/27-7/27 the bill came to a whopping $327!! Ouch. Now, I know that this is a good bit higher then the AC will cost me under normal usage. I saw this because I was home a full 2 weeks during July while work was being done, so that was TV/Stereo/etc on all day. There were almost 2 weeks of using the AC with the old windows that weren’t very good. There were the 2 days of the windows being replaced where, while I turned off the AC as they worked, the house warmed way up into the 90s and the AC had to work hard to cool the house back down. Not to mention those couple of VERY hot days (100+ at least once) and the several times the family was over where the sliding glass door was opened and closed tons of times as people went in and out.
So here’s hoping that from here on out, the bills won’t be too high in the Summer.. maybe $250 max. Even that’s a lot, but I’ve actually had bills hit $200 before, hell my average bill is around $160-170 due to my server that’s online 24/7, 2 tivos, etc. I did bump up my settings a degree during the day and a couple at night too. The Trane system I got has a nice thermostat that you can program each day with a time when you wake up, leave for work, return home, and go to sleep.. so the system will let the temp go up (or down for heating) when you’re gone to save some money.
For those that are curious.. I went with Air + Mechanical for the central air, and The Window Factory for the windows and am very happy with the jobs both outfits did. I would definitely recommend them to anyone looking to get either job done (and already have at work).
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