Our duplex was built sometime in the 1950s and it shows. The windows rattle when trucks go by, the front door has a gap you could slide a library card under, and the wall furnace sounds like a small airplane taking off. We rent, so replacing any of that isn't our call.
Last winter our PG&E bill hit $248 in January, and I finally sat down with the statements and a highlighter. Over the next few months we made a handful of cheap, reversible changes. Comparing the same months year over year, our average bill dropped by about $61 a month.
Here's exactly what we did.
Step 1: Actually read the bill
I'd been paying the total for two years without looking at the line items. When I finally did, I realized our bill has two parts: PG&E charges for delivery, and East Bay Community Energy charges for the electricity generation itself. Gas is its own section. Once I split it out, it was obvious that gas for heating was the biggest chunk in winter, and electricity during the late afternoon and evening was the biggest chunk the rest of the year.
I also logged into our online account and pulled the hourly usage chart. That chart ended up being the most useful tool of this whole project.
Step 2: Review the time-of-use plan
We were on a time-of-use rate plan where electricity costs more from 4 to 9 p.m. Which, of course, is exactly when we're home making dinner, running baths and doing laundry. The hourly chart showed a huge bump every evening.
PG&E has a rate comparison tool in the online account that estimates what you'd pay on other plans based on your actual usage. For us, staying on time-of-use made sense, but only if we shifted some usage out of the peak window. If your usage is flat all day, a different plan might save you more. It's worth ten minutes to check.
Step 3: Move the laundry and dishwasher
This was the easiest win. With twins, we do a load of laundry basically every day. I switched to starting laundry after 9 p.m. or first thing in the morning, and I set the dishwasher's delay-start so it runs overnight. We also stopped using the dryer's high-heat setting for towels and started hanging kid clothes on a folding rack in the hallway.
Step 4: Weatherstripping, the renter-friendly way
I asked our landlord first, and he was fine with anything removable. I spent about $38 at the hardware store on:
- Adhesive foam weatherstripping for the front and back doors
- A slide-on door sweep for the front door gap
- Removable rope caulk for the worst windows
- Foam gaskets behind the outlet covers on exterior walls
It took one nap time. The house felt noticeably less drafty that same night, and the furnace clicked on less often.
Step 5: Space heater vs. the furnace
Our wall furnace heats the whole place, including the living room nobody sits in at 2 a.m. For the twins' room, we tried a small oil-filled radiator heater with a thermostat and a tip-over shutoff, set low, placed well away from the cribs and curtains, and dropped the main furnace to 62 at night.
Some honest caveats: space heaters run on electricity, which isn't cheap here, so this only saves money if you're heating one small room instead of a whole house. And safety comes first. If you're unsure about using one in a kid's room, don't. We checked with our pediatrician about room temperature for sleep, and follow the heater's safety instructions to the letter.
Step 6: Turn down the water heater
Our water heater was set somewhere around "very hot." With permission from the landlord, Dan turned it down to about 120 degrees, which is a common recommendation and also safer for little hands at bath time. We haven't noticed any difference in showers.
The before and after
Here's the comparison, using the same months a year apart.
| Month | Before | After | Saved |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | $248 | $171 | $77 |
| February | $221 | $152 | $69 |
| March | $189 | $128 | $61 |
| April | $158 | $104 | $54 |
| May | $142 | $97 | $45 |
| June | $146 | $86 | $60 |
| Average | $184 | $123 | $61 |
Rates changed a bit over that year, so this isn't a perfect lab experiment. But the usage chart dropped too, which tells me the changes were real.
What didn't help much
Unplugging every single device at night made almost no difference, and it drove Dan crazy. Swapping the last few old bulbs for LEDs helped a little, but most of ours were already LEDs. The big wins were heating, timing and plugging drafts.
Sixty-one dollars a month is $732 a year. For a family on a tight Bay Area budget, that's a car repair, or a month of groceries, or a lot of Saturday pupusas.
