It’s Time To Stop Being Surprised By Your Electricity Bill. Here’s How You Can Do It.

Budgeting for your electricity bill can be next to impossible. Unlike your cable and phone bills, every month the price of electricity varies, leaving some consumers shocked when they open their bill to find it twice as high as expected.

Looking at data from thousands of Hero Power users, we weren’t surprised to see that most customers use the most electricity in July and the least amount of electricity in February – given the rising temperatures in the summers.  But the variance of energy use month-to-month is quite surprising. For instance, many use 60 percent more electricity in July than in May. That’s a huge difference in just two months, and if you are expecting your July bill to be similar to the bills you paid in May and June, you’ll be horrified when the bill finally arrives.

Here’s the thing: you don’t have to be surprised though. Monitoring your electricity usage throughout the month is now available and it’s easy.  In fact, we just released a tool that will notify you after a week what your electricity bill will be for the month. Hero Power sends weekly emails informing you of how much electricity you used the previous week and how much you’re projected to use for the entire month.  And with the Hero Power website and app, you can check how much electricity you use every day, so you are always up-to-date on your electricity consumption and projected bill.

How to budget for  your electricity bill

By monitoring your usage, you can create a budget and stick to it.  Do you have some of your old electricity bills or can you access it online? If so, you can look at how much electricity you consumed during the same month last year and, if there haven’t been significant changes to your home, your bill should be fairly close to what it was last year.  Depending on your personal finances, decide if that amount fits into your budget for the month or if you need to reduce it. Once your budget is set, check in at least once a week with your usage data to see if you are on track to spend more or less than you budgeted.

How to reduce your electricity bill

Hero Power has plenty of tips to help you make quick and easy changes to existing behaviors that will immediately lower your electric bill. That means energy and money-saving decisions that don’t actually require a greater time investment just to get a cheaper bill. So keep those in mind if your projected bill rises above your desired budget.

Finally, you can set up alerts to have Hero Power notify you once you’ve spent a certain amount on electricity for the month.  So if you don’t feel like monitoring your usage, you can have Hero Power do it for you!

Ready to start? Let’s start saving money here.