As both an electrician and a also having just gone through a new service in our new home u can offer a little info. You can mount your meter on a pedestal if you don't want to put on your house but the location will have to be approved by utility company. Doing so has both pros and cons, you will be responsible for the cost of both labor and materials to construct the pedestal, you should also install a main disconnect that would allow you to break power from the pedestal to your main panel inside (which also has a main shutoff). As an extra bonus you could install a transfer switch at the pedestal that would allow you to safely plug in a generator during a power outage, chain the generator to the pedestal and enjoy a quieter experience because the generator isn't right outside your window. The last consideration is that you will be responsible for any of the cost associated with the underground conduit and wire between the pedestal and the house, depending on how far away from the utility company connection you may also have to incur additional cost for wiring and conduit. Best of luck.

Most likely the reduced dryer use is where your lower bills are coming from. Count your blessings, and be glad you don't live in a neighborhood where short-sighted rules prohibit drying laundry on good old fashioned clotheslines. Another possible contributor is that with the new meter you might have been moved onto a different rate plan, whether you realized it or not. New smart meters present more opportunities for the power company to charge you more -- and sometimes less -- for the same usage. Some really old meters didn't have a peak demand logger (I still have one of these grey ladies on my house.) In such cases the power company might look at what high-load appliances you had, such as an electric water heater, and make assumptions about what peak load to expect (the higher your peak load, the more you pay per kWh that month). If your actual peak load is lower than their estimate, getting a meter that measures it could reduce your bill, even if your actual kWh usage stayed the same. PS - be glad you're rid of that FPE panel. A web search for "Federal Pacific Panel Fires" will tell you why. Square D (especially the QO series) are much better panels.

I was going to suggest going off grid electric, but given the power demands for the hobbies, that is a lot of panels. Still, I'd do the calculations. Is that a good wind area? If you can do it, you might flip David's suggestion of one utility around. Going back at least a decade, there are plenty of people out there that got disgusted with the cost of brining in electricity and went off grid instead. If you have nat gat, genset manufacturers have finally come around to making DC gensets for that application. (You really need a generator to equalize batteries by my understanding. That may well be, however, for flooded cell batteries only.) How come 3 ph is not a better way than single? You'd get 50% more power adding a third conductor of the same size. If you can get the POCO to give you 3 ph open delta, you can have 3 ph and 240V. That said,as Mike pointed out, with the cost of VFDs so low, what's the point? I was shocked when I looked at costs online a few months back. Note that you have to be careful about how the utility bills other than residential 124/240 too. The local utilities commission regulates that and some make sure that commercial and industrial users pay more by charging lots more/kWh for anything 3 phase. If you build efficiently, your costs other than the shop, hobby and domestic hot water can be be nil. Tankless and recirc seems like a weird match to me. You have a system that provides hot water on demand so you have no standby losses, then you connect it to a system with standby losses. Is the recirc going to be on a timer or controlled with occupancy sensors? If I have gas and need a new water heater, I'd buy a Westinghouse WGR060NG076 or larger tank and never look back. That goes especially with hard water unless you plan to install a water softener. Have you done the well research yet or maybe drilled already? I'd go with induction for your cooking hobs if you want easy clean-up. There is nothing easier. If you are not sure about it, buy a plug-in unit and see if you like it. You may save a lot of AC costs in addition to the straight savings at the cooktop. Ideally, I'd like one resistance hob for simmering. They suffer from the same drawbacks of the duty-cycle controlled power output as thermostatic resistance heating devices. I don't know if inverter powered induction is theoretically possible or practical as it is for microwave ovens, but it might work well if it is.

Ok. Yes you can email some photos. I’ll show you what I have as well. It’s confusing because everyone provider offers different things. Some say you should get first pole free. But it’s not the case. Then I was told voltage drops so they don’t give more that 150 feet of wire so I’m assuming I would need another pony pole but does that include a transformer? If it does include transformer and anyone can come off the pole then possibly I can use the neighbors transformer pole. Unless they are designated to the owners property? Texas6023@aol.com