$292.77 Power Bill for a Year

Our bill from December 2018

Our electric bill was $292.77. I don’t mean that was our bill for a month, a cold and rainy winter month. I mean that was our cumulative electric bill over twelve months. It averages out to $24.40 per month. I’ve included the amounts at the bottom of the post for reference.

Why is our power bill so low?

Some of it depends, no doubt, on our region and the fact that we signed up for an alternative energy provider. We live at the beach in Southern California, where the temperature is the same most of the year.

Mostly, though, it’s because we live in a tiny home and we don’t do much that draws power.

We live in a 612-square-foot studio apartment. It has one external door and a standard sliding glass door in the same wall.

This apartment isn’t great in terms of energy efficiency. If you stand next to the slider on cold nights, you can feel the temperature drop close to the glass.

On the other hand, we have only five light fixtures: two in the kitchen, two in the bathroom, and one in the closet. Usually only two of them are turned on.

We have one refrigerator and no chest freezer.

We do not have a washer or dryer. We have to take our clothes to the laundry room in another building.

We almost never watch TV. If we do, it’s generally a single episode of a 30- or 60-minute show.

We also rarely have a desktop computer turned on.

Our main power draws are charging our phones and my tablet, using the microwave and a countertop dishwasher, running an air filter, and charging the Roomba. I also use a flat iron and sometimes a hair dryer. I play the radio for my parrot during the day if we’re not home.

For most people, their biggest power draw is heating and air conditioning. We don’t have an air conditioner, or anywhere to install one. It’s fair to say that our power bill would be higher if we lived in a different climate, and it’s also fair to say that we moved here on purpose. We were willing to drastically downsize and we now live in a quarter of the space that we had when we first got married. A QUARTER!

Our entire studio apartment is approximately the size of the master bedroom in our old place. Or the garage. In fact I think it’s a little smaller than our first, double car garage.

We’re able to live in a space this small because we got rid of almost everything we owned. I’m sure it’s more than 80%.

A workbench, power tools, the lawnmower, the ladder, virtually everything that we used to store in the garage - gone.

Almost all our appliances, a couch and chairs and two dining tables - gone.

Almost all our books and three bookshelves - gone.

Look, we don’t miss it. A lot of that stuff was inexpensive, worn out, or carried over from our respective first marriages. When we eventually move back into a slightly larger place, we can afford to upgrade with all the money we’ve saved.

We spent some time visualizing and crunching numbers, and we downsized gradually over five moves, but we did it with strong intention. It’s no accident that our power bill is so low. In fact, it’s part of an overall plan and a concerted effort.

We saved 48% of our net income in 2018.

We did it by living in a tiny space, not owning a car, and prioritizing retirement savings over everything else.

While saving that much of our income, we also went on vacation three times. That’s part of WHY we live so cheaply, because we’d rather spend money splurging on vacation than by dribbling it away on things like a higher monthly electric bill, cable television, or snack foods.

Here are some ways we keep our electric bill low, other than simply living in a tiny little apartment:

We use lap blankets when it’s cold. Feels snuggly rather than the futile effort to turn up the heat in the room.

We use a heated mattress pad. Also feels very cozy and is more effective than heating the air in the room.

We wear socks inside, and I go so far as to wear a sweater, sometimes two. I’m one of those people who never feels warm enough, and I’d rather bundle up than, again, blast the heater.

We strategically open and close the sliding glass door in summer, planning when to let in cooler air or shut out hotter air. We’re also strategic about where to put the fan. (Helps to have an engineer around sometimes!).

A few weeks a year, it feels either intolerably hot or annoyingly cold here. We remind ourselves that it’s temporary and it’s worth it to be a little sweaty or grab an extra blanket. The alternative would be to move to a place that actually has air conditioning or more than a one-foot-square wall heater. We could do that, but right now we’d rather save money.

Save money and lots of it!

Other couples fight about money. We sit around talking smugly about our high savings rate. During times when we’re taking the bus rather than driving, or wrapping ourselves in blankets because our apartment is cold, we’re bonding through shared adversity. It’s easier for us to make strategic decisions about our cash flow because we’ve shown that we’re both willing to make sacrifices for our mutual benefit.

It’s even easier when we use the money we would have spent on heating a standard suburban ranch house to go on vacation instead.

If you’re curious about our electricity provider, here’s a referral link: https://www.arcadiapower.com/jessica9228

And yes, if you use this referral link, I personally benefit from it.

Arcadia Power

January 22, 2019     $33.44
December 24, 2018        $30.60
November 20, 2018       $15.72
October 17, 2018        $5.00
September 18, 2018        $23.48
August 20, 2018        $24.76
July 23, 2018           $25.08
June 20, 2018        $25.51
May 21, 2018        $17.51
April 24, 2018        $5.00
March 26, 2018        $41.01
            $6.71 (split billing because we moved to another unit in the same complex)
February 20, 2018        $38.95

= $292.77