ncage, We live in Wisconsin and our ground water is really high this year from all the rain and our sump pump has been cycling pretty much once per minute since mid March (it did stop for a week or two sometime during the past three months but then started up again). I've cut and pasted below a chart from our utility's web site showing our electricity consumption for the first five months of 2008 (when the sump pump ran pretty much every minute from mid-march until now) and the first 5 months of 2007 (when the sump pump didn't run much at all) so that you can see the increase in electricity consumption caused by our sump pump. The chart didn't cut and past very well so I hope you can understand it. We live in a 3,190 square foot two-story house. Our basement is 1,900 square feet. Column #1: Read Date Column #2: # Days Column #3: kWh Column #4: kWh/Day Column #5: $ Amount May 09, 2008---30---792---26.4---$115.34 Apr 09, 2008---29---719---24.8---$99.89 Mar 11, 2008---29---499---17.2---$71.99 Feb 11, 2008---32---694---21.7---$97.68 Jan 10, 2008---31---774---25.0---$104.71 May 09, 2007---28---521---18.6---$75.09 Apr 11, 2007---33---664---20.1---$89.00 Mar 09, 2007---28---600---21.4---$79.91 Feb 09, 2007---30---652---21.7---$86.72 Jan 10, 2007---30---723---24.1---$95.27

Update: Thanks for all the responses, folks. I thought maybe the freezer was the only issue, but apparently there is still something afoot here. In Oct (a mild month here in FL), we averaged 62 kw per day. I found an Oct bill from 2007, and our average usage was 40 kw per day. I don't think I used the HVAC more than two days in Oct of this year, no other reason why it should be so high. Nov and Dec bills were even worse- back up to $375. So we finally tried shutting everything off- turning off and unplugging everything in the house, turning off every breaker. Got the meter to stop spinning, then turned on one breaker at a time to see what would happen. A number of them caused the meter to spin very, very slowly, but one made it spin pretty quickly. It was for the lighting in our living room, master bath, and back porch, and everything was definitely unplugged and turned off. I had an electrician come out and so far he hasn't found anything that could be causing a problem, but he is sending out a couple of guys next week to do a more thorough inspection, including walking around the attic and checking things up there. My husband already checked the attic for HVAC issues, but couldn't find any loose duct work or anything like that. If anyone has any ideas of what else we could look for, I would be very grateful! I can not fathom why the lighting on that breaker would be using electricity with everything off and unplugged! Many thanks!

I thought about the conductor/resistance part. I dismissed it for a couple of reasons and I hope my logic was sound. Tell me if it is not. First, largest length of larger conductors is the drop or underground feed between the transformer and the home. The length of these are short compared to the conductors between the meter an the use point. The contribution is negligible. There are some homes that have a long way between the transformer and the home and maybe the OP has this situation. Second, the power loss in the drop or underground feed does not count because the meter is measuring power. In this light, the homeowner will save the power company some power by buying a larger service. The growth of power consumption in residential sites grew for so long ,and the bias to making bigger when replacing equipment is so strong, that increasing service size is almost a knee-jerk reaction. Will we ever see the point when someone needs to replace a rusted-out 200A main panel and meter and says, or the electrician says, don't need 200A, you could probably get away with a 125, but lets oversize and go with 150? Recently, I arranged a service size increase in my dad's home. I did not want to. He had 125 A service going back decades, but I think the 1959 original was smaller. The nominal 200A combo main panel/transfer switch that I chose had two choices for main breakers, 200 and 150A. Darn it! That forced a complete main service replacement. On the positive side, adding the remaining stuff did not add much to the overall cost of genset instalation. Ron, in your situation, if they are really bothersome, I'd be tempted to sign up for the energy savings program and then watch them scratch their heads after showing up. That kind of event might generate useful feedback to the sales part of the organization from their own field people (that is not getting trough from you). Once I got a call from a long distance telephone service provider asking me if I wanted to sign up. I thought for a second and said, go ahead. This was not too long after deregulation of that part of telephone service. At that moment, I was sitting at a university phone :-) The university had a system that went out and compared rates from two or three long distance services and put your call through the best way. I don't know what happened as a result of my saying yes to that caller. I am reasonably sure it is not what he expected. Was I being mean-spirited? I don't think so. I did benefit from a little amusement. I did not see my saying no and explaining likely being productive. If lucky, maybe I saved hundreds of other people on the university's exchange from nuisance calls and forced a productive change on their marketing end before they got too far into it.

Thanks for your comments so far. Yes, we are definitely on heat and not aux heat. We do have 2 thermostats and they are installed correctly. We agree that there's something causing our electric heat to work overtime for some reason. Don't know why yet. We've had the installing company out after install. There's no gas leak and wiring gets inspected by the county tomorrow. We did a large comparison of our daily electric charge from comparing last December and January to this year. So we compared last year's daily electric charge from our electric company and this year's daily charge. We then compared these charges based on the daily temperature so we could compare correctly. The daily electric charges are 50% higher every single day in our comparisons after the furnace was installed. We need to figure out why our heat pump is working overtime.