Utilities Estimates

[Pants]

DH and I are talking about buying a house. Currently we rent and only have gas/electric to pay for, but as part of homeownership we will have to pay for heat, water, and trash as well.
We live in M/H COLA. Winter is really cold and summer is really hot. Sounds great, right? We are looking to buy a house approx 1300-1600 sf, which would effect heating costs, obv.
What should I estimate for those costs?

[Deleted]

Hard to say. Do you know anyone who lives the area that you could ask?


We live in CT in a 1600sq ft house
We just installed a high efficiency nat gas boiler. We also have a separate natural gas hot water heater.
We pay roughly $160/month during the winter for heat and hot water and roughly $30 a monthly in the spring/summer/fall.
We pay roughly $120/month for electricity in the winter and roughly $180 in the summer.

[RoadToRiches]

Well, I live in 1800 sq feet condo. My electric usually runs around 40-50 bucks a month during winter times and when I run A/C, it jumps to 120-140 range during summer.
Gas is about 30-40 a month during summer time and 140-160 winter when I use heat. I would usually run my heat at 71 degrees. Recently I lowered it to 65 and my bill was 130 bucks.

So really it's the same for me if you combine those two. I budget 200 bucks per month for both. I am usually lower than that.

[hoops902]

Fairly LCOL area (Iowa). 1800 sq ft

Around $200-300/month in utilities between heat and electric. As one goes up, the other goes down. Winter is higher than summer which is higher than spring and fall.

Those numbers include some pretty big holes in the home as we remodeled, it's probably getting closer to the 150-250 range now that the holes are closed up.

[Tiny]

I'm not sure how what posters are paying will give you any idea of what you will pay. Electricity is .08 a kilowatt hour in my neck of the woods - I hear it's as high as .25 a kilowatt hour in other places... then there's taxes, delivery charges, fees and what not.

To get an estimate for where you live (or want to live) the local utilities WebSites may have information on 'average' usage/cost (by house size and number of occupants) - you may have to dig alittle deeper to get an idea of the 'base' charges - delivery, fees, surcharges, taxes that are added to the Usage.

A realitor in the area may also have some information about 'average' charges for utilities (water, sewerage, trash, etc) as well. Sometimes Cities/Towns/Villages produce this average info to be used by 'new home owners'.

Once I had the average or guesstimate numbers I'd add 10-15% more to it just to really see if I could handle the costs... cause you know it's NOT like costs, taxes, delivery charges, surcharges never go up or that new charges won't be added. I would want to be sure I could 'afford' the house today and 2 or 3 years from now...

[hoops902]

"A realitor in the area may also have some information about 'average' charges for utilities (water, sewerage, trash, etc) as well. Sometimes Cities/Towns/Villages produce this average info to be used by 'new home owners'. "

It's fairly common practice around here that homebuyers will list the average utility costs in their listings. We were also able to contact the utilities directly once we picked a home and they gave us the utility costs per month over the past year. We had to adjust it a bit for our likely usage compared to the current homeowner, but it was better than going in blind.

[ziyia]

We live in a little over 1300 sqft in the Midwest (also hot summers and cold winters). We pay about $170 a month for gas/electric/water combined.

[tskeeter]

These expenses can vary widely depending on where you are. Your best bet for a preliminary estimate is to ask your real estate agent. This is a common type of question, along with the cost of property taxes, so they should be able to give you an idea.

When you get to the point of making an offer on a house, you can ask the owner to provide copies of the last 12 months of utility bills. If they are way off from the average that your agent told you, figure out why. If they are way higher, is the house poorly insulated, are the windows drafty and in need of work, is the furnace a very inefficient 1860 model, do the current owners keep it 90 in the winter and 60 in the summer? If the bills are lower than normal, is the house unusually well insulated, sited to take best advantage of natural heating and cooling, well sealed against outside air infiltration, or a meat locker in the winter and a sauna in the summer? If the house is really good, you can afford to pay a bit more. If it's unusually poor, you should consider if you should factor the cost of upgrades and repairs into your offer. A weekend spent blowing additional insulation into an attic and caulking windows and doors can have a significant impact on your heating/cooling costs. Window treatments can have a lot of impact, too. The back of our house, with a lot of big windows, faces mostly west, so we get a lot of afternoon sun. When we first moved in and the windows were bare, afternoon temperatures in the house, with both AC units running wide open, were about 85 degrees. The quick fix was to cover the windows with some wrapping paper. This allowed the AC units to actually shut off during the hottest part of the day. The addition of honeycomb blinds that get closed when the sun moves around to the back of the house had even more impact. A patio cover, which shades the windows until about 5PM, when it really starts to cool down around here, has helped a lot, too.

[alabamagal]

Utility prices are very dependent on where you live, rates, weather, etc. Find someone you trust in the area and they should be able to give you a good estimate.

I live in 2400 sq ft ranch house in area that can get cold in the winter and is extremely humid in the summer. We have combined electric, water, sewer and gas bill (although we don't have any gas in our house.). Heat is all electric heat pump, not generally cold enough to justify gas heat. Our bills for all combined run from $250 in the spring and fall to $450 during the summer and if it is real cold.

We get all our services through the city, and rates are real good. If you live a couple miles away though, in the next county, you get a different utility with higher rates, and the water bills are very high since they just put in a new water system. Our water bill is $20 ($25 when DD is home from college...) but in the next county they can be up to $70 for normal usage.

[princessleia]

The websites of the utility companies in your area might be able to provide you with the energy costs associated with a address. Like ours here, MGE has a function on their website, Average Energy Use and Cost for Residential Addresses where we can input a address and it tells us the highest and lowest energy use/bill amounts associated with that address....helps you to decide whether to rent or purchase the apt or house and find out the related energy costs.

[pig]

"We were also able to contact the utilities directly once we picked a home and they gave us the utility costs per month over the past year."

That's what we did.

[whoisjohngalt]

You are not going to know until you pick a house. No websites or averages will tell you at what temp people kept their house, what life style they had, etc. I am home all day with my kids, if I wasn't I wouldn't be keeping temps where I am keeping them.

You can get the rates and try to "predict" how much you will be using.

Same for water.

Trash should be easy to find out, but probably the cheapest of them all.

Lena

[Peace77]

Depending on where you live, you may also have to pay a sewer charge. If the home has a septic system, it may need periodic pumping out and maintenance.

Homes can vary considerably in the amount of insulation. Often, the older homes (pre 1970's) have the least and newer homes tend to have more. It can also depend on the builder as some builders may skimp on it.

Also when budgeting for a home, don't forget the other things that you don't need in an apartment such as an outdoor door mats, outdoor garbage cans, lawn and garden equipment such as lawn mower, patio furniture, shrubs and flowers, etc.

It can add up fast.

[Apple]

I also agree with the people commenting on how much it varies by location and also by condition of the house. I had a 900 sq ft house with an older central a/c unit with gas furnace. My utilities to heat/cool that house were MUCH higher than my current house, which is almost 2400 sq feet and only about 7 blocks away from the old house. I did find out a couple reasons for that. While we had insulated the attic of the small house, there was one furnace vent in the living room that "didn't work". My then-DH had said he checked it (went in the crawl space to see if there was something in place to block the duct) but didn't find anything. A few years later, after the divorce, I was down there to find a water valve and found the duct just laying on the ground, blowing the nice warm air from the furnace . Fixed that and the bills went down some. Also, the ac unit, while the same brand as the new house, wasn't as efficient and needed a charge (I know much more about air conditioning than I did when I lived there). Electricity is also very cheap here, at most I pay about $80 a month in the summer, when I'm running ac all day long (100+ degree summers). If I lived anywhere else that bill might be huge.

A seller should be willing to provide utility usage/cost over the last year. That's really your best bet. I'd also ask what temp they keep it at to see if it's similar to what you would do. Some people heat to 90 all winter and then open windows because it's too hot (I truly don't understand this thinking, but I'm not the one paying the bill).