Cooling Costs Versus Heating Costs

When the weather is hot, we often start to see news stories about how the demand for air conditioning is straining the electrical grid—during the hottest part of the day rolling brown-outs are threatened in some areas because demand for electricity exceeds capacity. These stories don’t occur during the winter, so the demand for heat must not be quite as taxing on regional and national power supplies. Indeed, my brother-in-law told me the other day that his July electric bill was the highest one he had ever paid due to his round the clock need for AC. That scared Rural Ways because our July electric bill had not yet arrived, and the thought that it could be worse than what we paid for heat was alarming. We quickly attached the Kill-A-Watt to one of our two window AC units to see how bad it was going to be.

The preliminary results are in, and they are not as bad as we feared. The Kill-A-Watt says that the air conditioning unit in the office is costing approximately $15 per month. It is, of course, not being run round the clock since the nights in Parowan are almost always cool enough to leave it off. In any case, it must mean that the unit in the upstairs bedroom—which has not yet been tested—is working for about $5 per month. How do we know? Because we got our July electric bill and it was only $20 higher than the one we paid in June, when we were not using any AC. The best part of it is that neither bill was anywhere close to our winter high. For Rural Ways, the cost of electricity for heat in the winter far out strips what we pay for cooling in the summer. In fact, the average cost of electricity for our six most summery months over the past year was only a little more than half (56%) of the average cost of electricity for our six most wintery months.