Yesterday, I posted about the odyssey we have been having with our house. If there is a silver lining to this story, it's that the insulation we installed on our third floor has greatly reduced our gas bill (we have a gas furnace). Here's a copy of our gas bill from 2008, showing our usage for the previous 12 months:
We used 74.3 MCF (thousand cubic feet) of natural gas over the previous 12 months. Over that period of time, we paid an average of just over $10/MCF -- meaning we paid roughly $750 in natural gas usage over that 12 month period (plus fees).
At around that point, we fully insulated the third floor of our house (at a cost of maybe $120, plus all of our labor). Our latest gas bill shows our gas usage for the 12 months since we installed that insulation:
Wow! What a difference! The amount of gas needed in 12 months dropped from 74.3 to 10.5 MCF (a reduction of 85%). Some of the difference is certainly due to temperature differences between the two years. Some is also due to different thermostat settings. But clearly, the majority has to be due to the insulation we installed.
The latest graph looks a little strange. It looks like we used gas in Nov and Dec 2008, and then none since. In actuality, the Nov and Dec numbers are based on an estimate of our gas usage based from previous years. Of course, this estimate was waaay too high. The graph shows we haven't used any gas in the months since Dec, because we have been living off the credits from being overcharged. For this reason, our annual usage may have actually been lower than 10.5 MCF for the past year (because that 10.5 MCF includes gas we have been charged for, but haven't used yet, since we still have a credit).
Ok, so our house isn't quite a passive house [wikipedia.org] yet, but we just took a huge step in that direction. We just saved ourselves several hundred dollars in gas bills every year.
[Back to Part 1.]
Labels: homeowning
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