Dancer utility bills.
shadowcat
Atlanta suburb
Recently a dancers that I know well and lives fairly close to me, showed me her electric bill on her cell phone. I was for $271 for her 2 bedroom apartment. I would guess 1000-1200 sq ft. On the other hand my home is 1500 sq ft and my bill was only $76. I was discussing the huge difference with a buddy of mine and he suggested that she was growing cannabis in the guest bed room. Anybody got a better explanation?
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Many dancers simply do not have a fundamental understanding of personal finance. Often they can make more in one night than a working class PL makes in an entire week Easy money coming in so they don’t pay attention to money going out
She would often tell me her kids would have the A/C turned down to 68 but be wrapped up in blankets.
Another thing I’ve seen is perhaps she’s worked out a prior payment plan for getting behind before so extra money is added in each month to pay for older bills.
If you've been evicted, you are going to have to live in not-so-nice places, that could have little or no insulation. Or maybe somebody in her household runs the AC with windows open/broken?
Not exactly the best for energy efficiency.
Oh and while thinking about that, that was the worst fridge ever. Food would rot super quick in there, and the maintenance people would gaslight and say “oh well there’s nothing wrong here”
It was a place that was making $475 for each of our rooms or $1425 total. In some areas I get it that’s not much but in the specific place we were at seven years ago it was a lot. Yeah “cheap” apartments suck.
As a bonus, they were across the street from the county admin offices, so we always got our power restored first after Hurricanes. Even people in the back half of the same complex had to wait days longer.
Dam this thread smells like boomers
My small house in Phoenix is about 1500sf, and I run the pool pumps 8 hours/day. I'm on a time-of-use plan where the price gets jacked up 3-6pm, but cheaper the other 21 hours. So I cool the house down prior to that three hour period to minimize its AC use. I just paid my $325 electric bill, which would have been $400 w/out the time plan. So $271 and they're growing weed? Ha...no. That sounds pretty reasonable for an apartment...in the summer...in a hot city.
Either she has a very-old inefficient poorly maintained unit (perhaps she hasn’t even ever changed the filter?) - or she makes stripper-style decisions w.r.t. cooling her apt like putting the thermostat very-low – I’ve heard that if one puts the thermostat 20-degrees lower than the outside temp, the unit will hardly if ever shut-off as it will be hard to cool the place to that temp – could also be she has it running constantly vs on “auto” and it never shuts off – I’m thinking she’s not exercising common-sense w.r.t. how she uses her A/C vs it being a structural-issue but who knows for sure.
"... As Mr. Electricity states, a window unit uses anywhere from 500 to 1440 watts to run, while a 2.5 ton central unit (about the size for a typical 1,500- to 2,000-square-foot home) uses about 3,500 watts ..."
Which makes sense since wall-units are often much smaller than central-units
https://homeguides.sfgate.com/running-ce…
The age and efficiency of the A/C system can make a huge difference in what it consumes. I have 4500 sq ft and keep the house fairly cool. My high this year was $160. I have brand new units that are a few steps above builder grade.