Winter is being really harsh in my city at the moment. I’m practically freezing in my own home and I’m not doing this to myself on purpose. I wanted to dedicate a little blog post to a weird experience we’ve had with our electric bill last year. Oh, and for reference: 11 degrees Celsius is 51.8 in Fahrenheit.
We had/have an upstairs neighbor that seemed especially active at night. We could hear a television, talking, chairs and other furniture moving. But the sound wasn’t an issue. I mean, we had a family of 8 as our next door neighbors in the Netherlands, they made a lot more noise, from daytime until at least 1 am where they would slam windows and run outside onto the street and back home(?).
The thing is… our electric bill DOUBLED from one month to another last year. And later on you’ll see why I mentioned the upstairs neighbor…
In order to check what was going on and why our electric bill doubled all of a sudden, we shut down and unplugged all electric appliances at night. I mean everything: boiler, computers, fridge, inverters, television, Nintendo Switch, absolutely everything was unplugged. Then we checked the meter. The result: 0 usage. That’s correct.
BUT. Then we tested it again. Everything off and unplugged as before. The result: MORE night time usage than day time usage!
Then, we did another experiment. We shut down all fuses around 12 am. Funnily enough, there was suddenly a bunch of stumbling around upstairs once the fuse was pushed down.
When we switched off all fuses, there was no usage on the meter. When the fuses stayed on and we only disconnected our appliances, electricity was being consumed. We always did these experiments during the night, in total darkness. Not even a hallway light on.
So… yeah. It seems like some shenanigans were going on. For a while, we simply shut off the suspected fuse every single night when we went to bed. After a certain period of time, we decided to leave it on again, as our electricity bill normalized.
It became summer, and despite quite a bit of evidence that the increased bill wasn’t due to our consumption, I became scared to turn on the inverter/air conditioner. So bought an electric fan and used that throughout the entire summer (around 37 degrees Celsius or 98.6 in Fahrenheit). It wasn’t so bad, although more cooling would have been welcome.
But now it’s winter again, and I’m still scared of doubling our electric bill by using any form of heating. Even though we used to have the inverter on even at night – I mean, we’ve been living here for two years now – without racking up a huge bill.
I’m quite used to cold – my parents had to be sparingly with the electric and gas bill back in the day too – but it’s actually MUCH colder here in Bulgaria, at least in the area where we live. At the time of writing, it is -2 in my city, and 8 degrees Celsius in my old hometown. And we’re supposedly getting a “colder than expected February” lol. :(
Luckily, we’ll get our electric bill for this month in a few days. We’ve been slowly increasing the time of running the inverter, and so far the bill has been okay. We also keep an eye on our usage meter in the hallway.
It’s sad that it has to be like this, but if all goes well, we can leave the inverter on as much as we need it in February. I’ll add an update to this post.
Cats in the Cold
As for the cats, yeah, they’re cold too. But they can easily warm up by curling up on the bed or sleep in a basket. Ricky likes to sleep on top of the computer case. Not too good for the computer of course, but what are you gonna do about it. :D
They’re not as bothered by the cold as we are. It’s around 3-5 degrees Celsius (37.4 F) in the patio, and they enjoy going there. They even like sitting at the open window! But I refuse to open any window for them for now lol.
Every now and then, the sun appears in the morning. Tommy can’t believe it, either. The patio warms up quite nicely then. But for the rest of the day, it’s cold. Hope warmer will days will come soon.
