We have been comparing electric bills with friends in Poway (2400 sf) and Escondido (3000 sf). Our San Marcos house is 3000 sf.
All homes are roughly within 10 years age of each other. We have our A/C on 365 days / 24 hrs (wife’s instruction). They don’t.
Poway and Esco bills are more than double ours, approaching $1K/mo during summer.
They both have pools (Esco one is an extremely huge pool) and we don’t.
I’ve read that a pool increases elec use by 50%, appears to be true. Plus being further inland appears to have an effect also.
Back to original topic: we recently considered a portable A/C for a room we have over garage. It gets beat by the sun every afternoon and gets hot. Since we already have central A/C, we found the best solution to be adding a second register in that room. We did that recently and the room stays very comfortable now. Cost us $500 to have it installed (very hard to do in our attic) and love the results.[/quote]
Yes, running the A/C a lot will drive you into the poor house. We also run our A/C all the time, and we have two old pumps for our pool. We wanted to change out the pool pumps, but the previous owner had a very specific type of system installed for a specific pool vac, so we are stuck unless we want to re-pipe everything. 🙁
We’re in between you and your friends on our energy usage/costs. We’ve had solar panels installed and are waiting for some final work to be done, in addition to SDG&E and city permit stuff, before we can turn it on. It’s killing us to still be paying SDG&E for our electricity!
And I second what your wife says…gotta keep that cool air flowing! 🙂
