I don’t normally look at the utility bill until I’m ready to pay it. But after last month’s 200 plus dollar tab, mostly due to the stratospheric rise in natural gas prices recently, I was wondering how much less I spent during the last period, after having that trouble with my furnace. So I just took an advance peek at this month’s bill.

$320.

WTF!!! I was without heat for a week and a half last period, and the new furnace has been down intermittently ever since they installed it because it still isn’t working right (oh…more on that later I suppose…). And my bill goes up by a hundred dollars? It didn’t make sense. Then I noticed that the last period’s gas usage was Estimated. Not the electric mind you. The electric usage was marked Actual. Only the gas usage was Estimated.

They have never estimated me before. Never. I pay attention to these things. And I have every BGE bill stub from the day I moved into Casa del Garrett back in 2001. Yet the one month when my usage should have been off because of furnace trouble, they suddenly decide to estimate my usage. I’ve no idea what the algorithm is they use to estimate usage…I suspect it’s based on some sort of weighing against past usage verses temperatures for the period. But hell…who knows…? It’s just damn…fishy…that they decided now, of all billing cycles, to estimate my usage. And just the gas usage.

So I reckon I’ll be having a chat with them come Monday morning. I’ve never challenged a utility company bill before. Should be a totally delightful experience.

For the record, my Actual electric usage for the period amounted to about $80 worth. That was up from $43 last period and that makes sense because I was leaning on my electric space heaters for a non-trivial part of it. So the difference was about $37. My electric bill for December of 2004 was about $32. I reckon my space heaters cost me about $35 to $40 to heat the house with them for the 11 days I was without heat, plus the three days I had to take the new furnace out of service. Lets say $40 dollars worth of electricity for two weeks. That would make the space heaters cost about $80 to run for a month. Gas cost me $133 total last period, and about $166 total this one. I don’t think my clothes dryer and my gas range are a big part of that.

This is not a large house! It’s just a little fifteen-hundred square foot rowhouse for chrissakes. 300 plus dollar utility bills just don’t make sense for this little thing. Natural gas must suddenly be more precious per cubic foot then gold nowadays. So I’m going to try heating Casa del Garrett with the space heaters for a while, and see what that buys me. You don’t want to be running space heaters when you’re not home, but I can turn the heat down low so at least my water pipes don’t freeze, and then run the space heaters while I’m home. I’m going to do that for a whole billing period and see what the bill looks like then. 300 plus dollars a month to heat a fifteen hundred square foot house is too goddamn much.

If the space heaters work out cheaper, I might have an electrician come in next summer and put baseboard heaters in, as an alternative to the furnace. Then I could switch between them depending on which is more expensive. But I never thought I’d live to see the day electric heat was cheaper then natural gas.