Baby born..yeah!! Electricity bill...boo!!

[N00bster]

You can also buy a cheap watt meter online in order to identify which of your appliances use the most electricity.

Having actual numbers you will be able to make better decisions than just guessing which one is the culprit.

[Bubblegun]

Congratulations.

I suppose maternity leave will mean the lights are on longer during the day, the TV might be on all day. As I remember my old TV produced a lot of heat too and my wife noticed a spike in the bills. With our kids we also used a lot of electricity when we started to use the microwave, washing machine, more than usual.We never used the tumbul drier, but i can understand why we should use it.The computer was on a lot too. To save time we bought one of those water pots that keep water hot all day, again chewing up money, but saving time, and human energy.
To save time, we bought a dish washer but we try to use that only once a day, and it seemed to be the best TIME,MONEY stress reduction investment we ever did. The wife wanted one of those anti virus, dehumidifier, super all air cleaning thingy me bobs, and thats run 24 hours a day 7 days a week.Not that i think its made one bloody ounce of difference.(but as someone said choose your battles crefully9.LOL
If you have an electric hob, sterilising things too takes up a lot, and if your electricity is being used for heating I'd expect it to go up quite a bit since we are spending 24 hours a day at home and not going to work.

As someone said previously its probably not worth the battle.
I suppose this all came down to us saving our human physical,and mental energy, for financial and Electrical energy to invest in our own family/child time.( if that makes sense).
On a side note, the best financial investment we did after our kids were born was to take the child allowance we got and put it away into a mutual fund. We never missed the money, cause we never had it in the first place, and if they dont want to go to college, they have a large fund to start an IDECO.

[Roger101]

WOW! just got our latest (mid winter) power bill, its the lowest ever for winter ... just 8,500yen (all heating is electric)
and I live in Tohoku!!

Warm winters are great

[Tomthumb16]

Considering how much traction this post got I think it only fair to give a breakdown on the bill.

I rang TEPCO to get a breakdown on the bill.it turns out the electric bill was ¥33,000 and the gas came to ¥17,000.. The washing machine is now washing everything in hot water, baby puke, baby poo...my wife insists it’s the only way to get them really clean...(choose your battles.)

I asked if TEPCO has any cheaper family plans, the helpful lady informed me that the only other perhaps cheaper option is to pay a fixed rate of ¥10,000 per month (this applies to electric only) then once it goes over 400 kilowatts its ¥29 per kilowatt.. My usage for December was 1200 kilowatts..

Anyone else here know what their Kilowatts per month average is for winter months..?
TIA

[RetireJapan]

This year is weirdly warm, so we have used just over 600 a month in January and February. Last year was January 766, February 890, March 871. Much lower the rest of the year cause we're not running our electric oil heater all the time

[StockBeard]

Anyone else here know what their Kilowatts per month average is for winter months..?
TIA

November: 324
December: 428
January: 565
February: looking at 580 (surprisingly high considering we were out of the house for 1 week).
So, average for those 4 months is 475, but with huge variance.

[Jed331]

We recently switched to UQ and got our electricity all paid through them. I live in Sendai and I am paying around 5000yen per month and all heating (except water heating) and cooling Is electric, we don’t use any oil heaters at all.

With all these price increases our bill might go up a bit but not much (???)

[blos]

55 tsubo single-floor house, built to passivhaus standards. All electric, inc. a tesla m3.

Last electricity bill was 41k, and I do use all the 200V appliances and charge the car exclusively during the night. Night-time (after 1AM) usage is around 650kWh per month. Previous car's petrol was minimum 15k/mo, previous place gas was around 6k/mo.

The server and unifi wifi systems seem to eat around 300w extra 24/7, that's my only gripe point. Maybe I'll need to chug the 24-port PoE switch and get something cheaper to run. The server is already running on a 90% efficient PSU.

I don't have to heat during the winter...