Loving my energy efficient house right now

[Brian Elfert]

I am really loving my energy efficient house after getting my gas/electric bill today. The average temperature for the month was 7 degrees (10 degrees less than last year) and yet I only paid $232 for both natural gas and electricity for the month. My house is about 2,700 sq ft (with finished basement) and I really expected to pay more since it has been so cold and I'm heating more of the house. I was also working on the house this past month and someone was in the house for nearly three weeks during the day so I had to turn up the heat during the day.

My house was built in 2001 and Minnesota has some fairly strict energy codes. It does help that my heating is zoned between floors so only the 2nd floor is heated at night. It doesn't really have any exotic stuff like spray foam insulation or anything like that. The biggest thing is the house is well sealed against air leakage per code. (It has an air exchanger to maintain air quality.) Insulation is plain old fiberglass.

[Jeff Erbele]

Brain,

That is pretty darn good, given the parameters. Frankly, impressive.

I know our total gas/electric bill was less but so is our sq footage, with a crawl space, a more southern latitude, a milder winter this season, and with a solar system, in a region with more solar exposure. (Average annual 302 days of sunshine).

While the nation as a whole has had an unusally severe winter, we have been very lucky overall. We had a couple of cold snaps, way below normal; the first week in December and another about two weeks ago, but overall not a bad winter. Nothing like the national news reports nation wide; at all. Here, a little cold, a little snow, but only a little; then it warms up. Denver has been warmer than the South, Atlanta, DC, NYC, even Alabama sometimes. Here, it has been in the high 50's and low 60's sometimes. We're pouring cement and building a house in fairly nice weather most of the time. At the same time we still have snow on the ground. ...perhaps a few more days. Up in the mountains to our West is a whole 'nother story. The story changes vastly by as little as 10 - 20 miles horizontal, and 500 feet or less vertical.

I'm curious how our new high energy efficient home under construction will preform. It comes with an energy efficient guarantee; the builder will pay our energy bills for two years if it does not meet the advertised criteria.

[Ethan Melad]

I've been feeling the same way. We built in 2011, about 2000sqf built with SIPs. It's a passive solar design, but we have some awesome prototype windows that allowed us to eliminate the need for thermal mass within the house (I'd be happy to explain further if anyone's interested..).
We have only electric, and our monthly bill rarely goes above $110 ($70 in the summer)- and thats including power used by my shop, which I'm in 5 days a week. We go through about 2 cords of wood for the winter, but we cut and split it all ourselves.

Good to hear Minnesota's got strict efficiency codes, and I wish more people knew that efficiency is not necessarily an expensive or luxury option. Good design and building materials can make a huge difference.

[Jerome Stanek]

I have an older 1970's home that is 1700 with full basement and last months bills were $240 combined that includes the electric for my shop

[Brian Elfert]

I would have to guess that Ohio hasn't been quite as cold as Minnesota. I had really expected the bill to be much higher as cold as it has been and as wasteful as I have been with energy in the past month. There were several days I opened the door to the garage and used a fan to blow warm air into the garage so I could work out there.