I recently bought a 900 sq ft house (84m²) and the electricity bill is insane, saying I'm using 4000 kWh per month. Winters are mild, the temperature floats to around 25°F (-5°C) at night, not much lower ever.
I'm examining all possible reasons; one potential is that a neighbor is stealing power. When I bought the house, there was zero landscaping, only bare dirt, so running a cable and kicking dirt over it would be easy, no need to repair any lawn.
I checked the area around the power meter and cannot find anything except cable TV and satellite TV cables. There is only one exterior outlet. Are there other potential places an electricity thief could plug in to steal power? Could they connect, for example, at a back-alley behind the house?
Best Answer
Understand how much power you are using
4000 KWH per month... 720 hours per month... that's 5600 watts on average all the time.
This is the equivalent of a dryer running continuously... 24 x 7...
If this was heating water, that is enough energy to heat nearly 1 gallon per minute continuously - nearly a low-flow showerhead. A pretty big leak in the hot water system would do that. A big leak!
If someone tapped an outdoor circuit, the most they could draw is 1800 watts or about 1/3 of your draw. That wouldn't explain this.
Since you don't have gas, the #1 probability is your heat. Resistive strip electric heat is CHEEEEAP to install and expensive to run. (However in many locations where electric heat is popular, the power company often offers special electric tariff rates to make electric heat beneficial - so talk to your power company about rate plans).
To give you an idea how much heat this is, this is 19,000 BTU/hr continuously on average. That's about right for heating a house.