Roughly What Do You Pay a Month for Heating/electrical?

how big is your house
how old is your house
one story or 2
old or new window
what kind of thermostat do you have

Hi Holly.
I live in a ranch with basement - about 1900 square feet.
And am vigilante about the thermostat. Even one degree higher or lower makes a huge difference.

Winter - gas around $95-$170/monthly depending how cold.
Electric - $45 - $60/monthly

Summer - gas around $50 every 2 months
Electric $90 - $175 depending how hot it gets

Hope that helps!
S. in Lisle

Hi Holly, We live in the Plainfield area, and we pay $80 per month for heating, and our electric averages around $120 a month.

We're in Elk Grove Village: approx costs are:
gas Nicor: winter up to $200; summer-$35.00
electric ComEd: summer up to $140; winter-$70 to $90 depending on weather of course.

New windows that have double glass panels will save on the bill. We got new windows in most of our rooms and the bills and the noice factor from the road nearby have gone down dramatically. Using environmentally friendly light bulbs and Energy Star equipment will help too.

I have:

1 story 3 bedroom and 2 bath, vaulted ceilings and a full finished basement with 2 more bedrooms and a bath

We have a programmable thermostat and windows that are in ok shape. Probably 15 years old so we probably need new ones.

Anyway, we are on the budget program for our ComEd and Nicor and we pay $185/month for ComEd and about $86 for Nicor (this just went down from $150/month).

All those things brought up do make a HUGE difference. We moved almost a year ago from a newer house to an older house. Those utilities about doubled as we went to an older house and square footage went to 1.5 times the size. We're looking into adding insulation to the attic as that's another way to really help efficiency along with the programmable thermostat (which the thermostat actually doesn't do US a lot of good because I work from home but it helped a lot I think when I worked outside the home). If you have a pool that makes a big difference too, since we took out a pool from the new house and they've been way overcharging the estimates for gas this summer because they've estimated based on the pool still being there. So all that to say the range can be large and varies by season as well of course with gas high in winter and electric high in summer due to heating and cooling the house.