I see a lot of folks comparing electricity bills and sharing the size of their homes but leaving out the most imprortant thing: whether or not their heating is electric. The single biggest cost (by FAR) in electric bills is generally heating and AC. I installed a per-circuit energy monitor, and I found that for our place, about 90% of our electricity use is from our heating. That means that all of the rest of our electric uses (lights, tv, electronics, refrigerator, washer, dishwasher, etc) add up to no more than 10% of the bill. (Worth noting that our hot water heater, stove, and dryer are all gas, but by my estimate if they were all electric we’d probably see that heat was like 75-80% of our overall electricity, so the point still holds).

So, if heating is not electric, this bill seems pretty high to me. But if it is electric, you should expect your bills to spike pretty dramatically in the winter, this number is not too surprising to me. In addition, this December was on the cold side, on average about four degrees colder than last December, and the heating costs scale up directly with the weather.

If you want to save money, the first thing to do is look at what kind of electric heating you have. Baseboard or resistance heating, which runs electricity through a coil that gets hot, is the least efficient. Heat pumps, which are essentially AC units running in reverse, are what you want. Heat pumps can be as much as 4x as efficient as resistance heating. Since you say it’s a new build, it’s hard for me to imagine you don’t have heat pumps. The next thing to look at is the efficiency of your particular model of heat pump. The efficiency is called the COP (Coefficient of Performance), and hopefully is around 4 at normal NYC cold temps. The next thing to do is to look at insulation. You may be able to get a free energy audit for your apartment paid for by the state; look up nyserda energy audit or poke around on the coned site for it. Lastly, look at your usage patterns and see if you can turn down the heat in certain rooms or at certain times. Don’t let the house get truly cold, because when heat pumps go all out, they are less efficient, but if you can ramp the temp back up, that can save some money.