Take measures to reduce electric bill

The Feb. 18 Gazette article, "Sparks fly at Senate hearing on Delmarva Power bills," by Kevin Conlon, was painful for me to read. Besides reporting complaints and names of people who said things, it seemed to me that no problems were solved, no suggestions were made, and nobody learned anything. I offer the following suggestions.

If your costs for heat must be reduced, there are a few easy things you can do if you prepare ahead of time. Give up heating the whole house and move everyone into one room, or into the basement if it has small rooms with good walls, and heat the one-room space with a one-room electric space heater. That heat should cost about 20 to 35 cents, max, per hour. That is less than $8 per day, less than $240 per month (my worst ever monthly winter electric heat pump bill was $350). In actual measurements I made, the thermostat on my one-room space heater was on about half the time, so that would cut the $240 down to $120 per month. Of course, those figures are nominal, and for your specific situation, your experience will be different.

Getting a gas- or oil-powered residential room heater will work but you must also get a digital carbon monoxide meter and a digital carbon dioxide meter (and read it regularly) or you might kill yourself from excess carbon monoxide (toxic at 100 ppm) or carbon dioxide (toxic at 5,000 ppm). 

You should try turning the heat down as much as you can – and pile on more blankets – at night when you are sleeping. Also, if you use more blankets, sweaters and gloves, then you might be able to lower your thermostat a few degrees and that will help reduce your bill more than you might think too.

If you have an electric hot water heater, turn it off. Organize all your hot water needs for one hour of the day and turn the hot water heater on a half hour to one hour before your needs. Then turn it back off when you don't need hot water anymore. In my experience, this can cut around $15 or more off the monthly electric bill.

A problem with most heat pumps is that as outside temperatures go down, the temperature of air coming out of the inside ducts goes down proportionately too. That inside duct air temperature can become lower than you would like. My present heat pump compressor automatically shuts off around an outside temperature of 25 to 30 degrees and automatically turns on the more expensive built-in resistance heat. And your electric bill will go up more than you think it should. If whole subdivisions are on heat pumps, and a freak deep cold wave hits, then the power grid can get overloaded as the total power draw doubles or triples and the grid collapses. Some 25 years ago, this happened to me at our previous house. Restoring power took days. 

Windows are thermally very leaky compared to walls. If you can tightly cover windows with any kind of blanketing and tightly seal the cracks, that will help a lot too. Your public library and internet searches will give additional help.