- Jan 5, 2011
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So I just got my bill for december's (12/5 to 1/7) gas use 25.4 Mcf ($220). I totally flipped I knew it would be high because the attic wasn't adequately insulated (had R13). Earliest we could have someone bring that up to an R50 was the first week of january. So future bills will be lower. Knowing that will account for 20% we figured the bill would be for about 15 Mcf since typically winter months around here properly insulated houses of the same size use 10-12 Mcf. For november (10/31 to 12/4) gas use was 3.8 Mcf ($37). So using the gas meter and the specifications of the gas appliances (dryer, water heater, and furnace), I set out to figure out why it was so high. I isolated each appliance to use the gas meter to gauge the gas usage. I game up with the following using a stop watch:
water heater pilot: 306 cu ft per month (based on 1/10th of a cu ft used in 214.62 seconds (about 2.5 minutes)
water heater heating water: 1328.5 cu ft per month (based on 1cuft used in 113.69 seconds (just under 2 minutes)
based on water water heater energy usage sticker it uses and estimated 2,116 cu ft per month (based on the 254 therms from the sticker)
Dryer: 23.6 cu ft per hour (based on 1/2 cu ft in 76.15 seconds) or 22 cu ft per hour (based on 22,000 BTU input specification).
furnace: Consumes about 1 cu ft per minute I'm almost certain it only came on at most 4 times per hour for 5 minutes each time for a total of 13,609 cu ft per month. I figure worse case scenario 6 times per hour for 5 minutes would be 20,413 cu ft per month. Either way things don't appear to add up when you consider the dryer. For the worse case scenario of the furnace that means the dryer was running 4 hours ever single day of the the billing period and I definitely know that isn't even close since we only do laundry 3 times a week and at most 2 loads each time. Which would have been at most about 30 hours of dryer use. Even if I assume they misread the meter at the end of november's period; november was pretty warm so there would have been almost no heating done at all; I still can't account for the total amount of gas used for the full 68 days of both billing periods.
water heater pilot: 306 cu ft per month (based on 1/10th of a cu ft used in 214.62 seconds (about 2.5 minutes)
water heater heating water: 1328.5 cu ft per month (based on 1cuft used in 113.69 seconds (just under 2 minutes)
based on water water heater energy usage sticker it uses and estimated 2,116 cu ft per month (based on the 254 therms from the sticker)
Dryer: 23.6 cu ft per hour (based on 1/2 cu ft in 76.15 seconds) or 22 cu ft per hour (based on 22,000 BTU input specification).
furnace: Consumes about 1 cu ft per minute I'm almost certain it only came on at most 4 times per hour for 5 minutes each time for a total of 13,609 cu ft per month. I figure worse case scenario 6 times per hour for 5 minutes would be 20,413 cu ft per month. Either way things don't appear to add up when you consider the dryer. For the worse case scenario of the furnace that means the dryer was running 4 hours ever single day of the the billing period and I definitely know that isn't even close since we only do laundry 3 times a week and at most 2 loads each time. Which would have been at most about 30 hours of dryer use. Even if I assume they misread the meter at the end of november's period; november was pretty warm so there would have been almost no heating done at all; I still can't account for the total amount of gas used for the full 68 days of both billing periods.
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