Comments

1
Cold And Angry In Lake City — I'll assume SFH means no inlaw or shared common space (I once had a landlord running the servers for his tech company out of the garage below me which turned out to be on my bill), so we can rule out a 3rd party power suck.

Does Seattle City Lights use smart meters and have a user login that lets you monitor what times your max power usage is (PG&E down here is SF does)? That could help narrow down the culprit. It'll suck—I've lived in homes where we couldn't afford the minimum oil delivery so we went without heat altogether—but you might just try and stop using the baseboards for a month. Maybe invest in some electric oil radiators? I have one that uses considerably less power than my baseboards.

I've also had an experience like this where it turns out a housemate was running a space heater all day because they "liked their room to be warm when they got home" after lying about it for months. You might have to play hall monitor for a while and make sure there isn't similar shenanigans happening in your home.
3
As everyone knows, I work for City Light, but I am also a customer. Chez Vel-DuRay is an old house, but it has gas heat. Our CL bill runs about $150 or so every two months. However, if we were to use the electric baseboard heat in the basement family room, it would add about $50 to the bill. So we just let that part of the house be cold, and use space heaters if we spend any time down there.

The good news for the cheap landlord is that there are usually very generous incentives and rebates to insulate and replace windows. They are based on the home's heat source, so if you have gas, PSE administers it and if you have electric SCL administers it (if you have oil heat, you are SOL).

The incentives come and go as the pots that funds them are emptied and refilled, but if you get them at the right time, it's quite handy. We got new windows and insulation when we bought the house, and the money from PSE really made a difference (I made sure we had converted to gas from oil before I even dreamed of doing that work, so that I would qualify for the rebate)

Aside from old timey windows and no insulation, there are other things that can drive a bill up. Mr. Vel-DuRay and I have a modern washer and dryer. We live a sedate life and retire early. If there were more, less sedentary people in the house, more energy would be used. If the water heater is elderly, it can drive up the power bill. If hot water faucets are leaky, they can drive up the power bill. Computers and such can also contribute their little part (or big part, in the case of servers and things - and don't get me started on this whole Bitcoin thing)

And here's the dirty little secret about baseboard heaters - unless you turn off the breaker, there's no way to really shut them off, and the older thermostats are very schizophrenic.

To Our Dear Dougsf: City Light is in the process of installing the "smart" meters, but the system is nowhere near being fully implemented yet. I, for one, yearn for that day. Those old-fashioned meters are corny. This is the modern era.

My heart goes out to the letter writer. I have "been there" as the young people say. Horrid landlords are timeless, I'm afraid.

4
@1: The traditional meters won't report peak usage, since they just record and display a running total, but you could find that yourself with a regular meter if wanted to. People have done this for many decades. You'd need some stuff like a pencil, paper, and maybe a flashlight, and you'd have to walk over to your meter and look at it periodically.

You don't need an electrical meter with digital display or remote-control capabilities to find out how much electricity your home uses. The analog meters display a count of total usage just like the digital ones, only with dials instead of LCD digits. To see how much electricity you used in a day, read the meter, then read it again a day later, and subtract the numbers. For an hour, or for five minutes, do the same for a shorter period.

Unlike the "smart meters," analog meters do not track your usage patterns over time (e.g., when the house is usually using electricity like people are home and when it usually looks empty, when an appliance kicked on and what the pattern of its use over those few seconds were), and they neither transmit that data to outside parties (e.g., utility company staff, every operator in some smart meter contractor's data center) nor allow remote reprogramming or shut-off upon direction of outside parties (e.g., the utility company staff, vendor staff, Chinese hackers, some stalker, would-be burglar, extortion malware bitcoin bot).

I would love to have an electrical meter that will report to a computer inside my house, via wire just what is going on, electrically, inside my house at any given time. I would chart that over time in case I was ever interested in historic usage. The electric company could still come and read it every month or two, or they could trust me to report it to them and just do period spot-checks. But that's not available. To get all the goodies, you have to route all your data across an untrusted and likely shitty (*) network to some third party vendor who are motivated neither to keep private data private nor to ensure public access to public data.

* I requested records related to security audits of Seattle City Light's chosen meter vendor. In response, they delayed for months so the vendor could get a restraining order, which they and other bidders for the meter contract did. I fought it in court, and the judge forced the city to hold back some, but not all, of those records. More recently, they're issuing DMCA takedown notices to organizations who have republished some of the same records.
5
1) It's an injunction, not a restraining order but that's trivial. Usually it only takes a few days for a judge to issue an injunction against the release of partial bid proposals. The months wait was City Light dicking around most likely. Proposals are not usually subject to release until after the RFP is complete and contracts executed. There could have been ongoing negotiation or bid protests.
6
$1000 for four people for four months is not that shocking. I’m one person in a third-floor unit with new windows, and during the winter I can easily pay $350 for four months just for me. You’ve got four people charging gadgets, taking showers, washing clothes, cooking ... your bill sounds about right.
7
@3 I'm surprised anti-smart meter Luddites haven't spilled over onto Slog yet. Like most things of this nature, everyone in the Bay Area has already forgotten what their objections were and detailed energy bill breakdowns are enjoyed across the land.
8
Doug dear, don’t you get it? The meters spew radiation like a leaky microwave oven, so that they can kill all of us for the Chinese. And in the meantime, the utility will be looking at when you open your refrigerator or get up at night so that they can figure out ways to jack up your bill. And they’ll sell that information to marketers because everyone is hungry to know everyone else’s kilowatt-hour consumption, and then they’ll go on lavish vacations at upscale locations. And the hacking! My God, the hacking!

Wake up, sheeple!!!!
9
@9 Oh, that's right! I must be sitting too close to my meter.

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