Quote Originally Posted by toddxtyboy View Post
More adventures in my new home in the Poconos!

so our first electric bill came in at $260, and we were shocked! we changed our high use lights to LED bulbs and changed our thermostat from 68 to 63 degrees in the occupied rooms. The next bill came in and it was $420!! thats almost as much as my mortgage!

I wear we couldn't be using that much electricity so today I went breaker by breaker to determine what was using so much. sure enough it is our electric baseboard heaters. In our unscientific test it brings the rotation of the analog electric meter from 20 mississippi's to 3 mississipi's.

Could something be wrong with the wiring? or is this just how much it costs for electric heat?

About the home: 2600sq ft, individual room thermostats and a propane fireplace in the kitchen. Thermostats are set to 63 where we stay, night time and bathrooms set to 50. I'm not sure if i need to keep heat on in the bathrooms to prevent pipes from freezing,

Thank you guys!
There were the cheap resistive base boards with the basic Honeywell thermostats when we moved in years ago and no wood stove. One month that winter we had a $900 electric bill.
We replaced them with a combination of Fahrenheat and Cadet Softheat hydronic base board heaters along with a woodstove.

What really made the difference is 7 day programmable thermostats. Once they were dialed in, the house is always comfortable and very economical considering it’s base board heating.
The heaters run only when you want and our unused upstairs rooms only heat if the temp drops to 50 and you can set that lower if you want. Upstairs bathroom heat only runs two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening.

From Dec 2012 to the billing cycle that ended yesterday avg annual monthly cost was $218.91 for the same size (2600 sf) house. This is an alternative to heat pump or mini-split systems, but relies on the wood stove to supplement heating.

Here are the thermostats:

http://www.supplyhouse.com/Honeywell...FRBXDQod6doHhg

Good luck.