So, my condo is a quaint Victorian home. Well, a quaint Victorian firehouse that was converted into a condo 30 years ago. Of course, being Seattle, all of the heating is electric, and being Victorian (and subject to Seattle historic preservation society rules) the windows are a bit leaky and drafty, and being Victorian and in Seattle, there's not a lot of light normally so I need to have a lot of lights on all the time to keep myself from getting rather depressed.
So I was expecting a fairly large electricity bill, but I wasn't expecting it to be $275!
Basically, the bill claims I used 3259kWh over the last two months, or an average of 49kWh per day — an average current draw of 2KW. That seems pretty high... until you consider the lighting and the heating.
The electric baseboard heaters in the dining room end up running way more than I'd like, because of the drafty windows, and the thermostat is also kind of fiddly with a ridiculously large hysteresis dead zone. Many times I've come home at the end of the day for the place to be sweltering inside. Clearly I need a better thermostat.
Lighting-wise, it's mostly halogen and incandescent track lighting. I've been slowly replacing the incandescent bulbs with LED ones, although it's taken me a while since the dining room spot lights require getting up on a ladder, and I'm not so good with ladders (I'm not afraid of heights, I'm afraid of falling from them). The dining room has 6 spotlights, previously each with a 75W bulb in it. The kitchen and studio each have 5 halogen PAR20 lights, each with a 50W bulb in them. That adds up to 950W right there. Of course, I don't run them 24/7, but I do run them quite a lot. In any case, I've finally ordered a 10-pack of PAR20 bulbs so that I can replace those ones right away. (They do not require climbing up on a dreaded ladder.)
A few weeks ago I did add some (technically HOA-covenant-violating) weather stripping to my dining room windows to improve the draftiness, and it helped but even then the baseboard heater still ends up running way more than I'd like. I have no idea what the wattage on it is but it's likely 1kW on its own. Then there's the heaters in the bedroom and studio, although they don't run nearly as much (admittedly because they get plenty of heat from the dining room and from the studio lights).
The dining room thermostat does have a "setback" function which doesn't work very well, but which would still be better than not using it at all. So I should definitely set that up, finally, and maybe look for a more modern, easier-to-program baseboard thermostat. (This one uses a mechanical timer switch that's fiddly and drifts way too much, among other problems.)
Other than that I can't really think of anything else that would be taking much power. All of my computers are pretty "green" (laptops or laptop-class hardware which maxes out at 75W and mostly goes into low-power mode most of the time). I guess there's a few things I leave on all the time that I shouldn't, like the stereo in the dining room. Unfortunately it doesn't have an automatic power-saver feature like the one in the living room. But it also shouldn't be taking more than a few dozen watts sitting idle, right? It doesn't get very warm, in any case.
What other stuff should I look at? I had a window person look at the dining room windows and there wasn't anything he could do because of the historical building stuff (they care very deeply about preserving the "character" of the windows), but the skylights aren't regulated by that and they might benefit from getting their seals replaced (I know the seal is failing in the bedroom skylight, for example).
It's also possible that this was a one-time irregularity, like maybe the power company didn't bill the previous owners for their last two months of service or something, although I can't see that mistake as having been made. I really should have checked my meter when I first moved in. The amount on the meter now is about 230kWh higher than on my bill, though, and the reading was taken 5 days ago, so that's 46kWh/day - consistent with my bill. At this very moment my meter is spinning at about 8 seconds per revolution, with a kH of 7.2 meaning I'm drawing about 3200W right now. Yikes. But the scary thing is that most of the meters in the building are spinning faster!