Utility Bills

How to read your electric bill

How to read your gas bill

How to read your water bill

How to read your gasoline receipt

How to read your ___ bill (fuel oil? sewer?)

How to make utility bills better

Wouldn't it be great if your utility bill contained all of the information you needed to figure out how much power you were consuming and when? Such that you could see how much it cost to run the dryer at high heat vs. medium or to superheat the water for your dishwasher? Many utilities (like PG&E) have good web sites for month-to-month data (with graphs, information about the weather for that month, and the like). For people with "smart" or "time of use" meters on their houses, utilities sometimes have really great data available, to the point that you can see your refrigerator turning on and off. There are also whole house meters that will read your electric meter every minute or so and give you an independent source of information.

IMO, Utility bills should give you something to relate to -- that you can actually understand. And perhaps even an idea of how you compare to your neighbors (the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District has implemented this idea and others have picked up on it -- go Positive Energy :) In CA, we have "baseline" and increasingly-expensive bands above it, but no explanation: the bill should tell you how much you'd save for each you took given the top band in which you paid for electricity last month). It should calculate the average power consumption and tell you that you were consuming, on average, for the entire month. e.g. "the equivalent of 500W continuously for the entire month." If there is better data from a time of use meter, it should tell you, "you used 300W continuously during the night and 700W continuously during the day." If you have really good software, it should tell you that you appear to have N periods in the day (e.g. sleep, getting ready, some people gone, no one home, cooking, night-awake) and give you a breakdown for each one. If there is a significant phantom / base load, it should automatically be identified (you can see the fridge cycling on and off to remove it from the data -- perhaps you can even suggest upgrades / hacks for fridges that defrost too often :).

Um yeah, like ~Google.org is doing:

Otherwise, if you hear from the utility that you consumed 300 kWh last month (or, in Soren's case, 60 ;), you have no idea what that means. You know what a 100W light bulb is, and maybe that a ~23W CFL is equivalent. If you had five 100W bulbs and switched them to CFLs, it would be nice to think that your electric bill would not force you to divide by the number of hours in a month to figure out whether you'd saved anything. It might not hurt to help you compare to your neighbors at the same time. If you opted-in on the web site, you could find out the average for someone with your size / age of home / improvements (like insulation), number of people, etc. You could find out what is possible and how much it might cost.

A company called Positive Energy is working on utility bills and using behavioral science to study how their encouragements to conserve and curb peak demand work. It will be interesting to see what they come up with. In particular, they could automate the process of becoming energy conscious (per Directions and the rest of this wiki). I believe that the possibilites of applying behavioral science to energy conservation has extremely high potential for both energy and dollar savings.

From a review of the Cent-a-Meter on PowerMeterStore.com

A few weeks ago, I receved a Home Energy Report from Puget Sound Energy. I'm using 66% less energy than my so-called "effecient neighbors" and saved $1301 last year in electricity relative to the previous year. Most of this I attribute to the Cent-A-Meter. Once you know what you are using, it's easy to turn stuff off.

AmientDevices has a live, color-coded meter-reading device called EnergyJoule -- it shows the current cost of electricity as well as current household consumption.  It appears to require a specialized smart meter, but this sort of thing is likely to exist in the future. :)

Smart Meters

A number of companies, e.g. PG&E (CA) and PGE (Portland) are getting into smart meter deployment in a big way. This means better bills might be coming before too long ... ideally bills that can be updated at any moment and lots of other good information.  Thanks go to Ned for a link to PGE's meet your new smart meter.