Your Monthly Statement

The information included on your monthly billing statement is one way to determine if your electricity use is normal. On the back of your statement, take a look at the graph marked “Energy Usage History”.

Around 50% of the monthly energy use in a home can be attributed to the heating and/or air conditioning system, which makes energy use fairly predictable based on the season. For this reason, it’s best to compare the current months energy use to the same month in the previous year since weather patterns are normally similar.

This section of the bill lays out the past 13 months billing history in a bar graph and underneath it offers a comparison between the current month, previous month, and same billing period last year. Using this data and the comparisons it offers, you can make a fairly accurate determination on whether your bill is normal for the season or not.

Usage Tracker

Since temperatures from day to day can very wildly, detailed daily energy use data is valuable when determining if your energy use is normal or elevated due to a problem.

Through our member portal at sremc.com, or by logging into your account on the South River EMC app, members can view their daily energy use and temperature information using a tool called Usage Tracker.

The blue and gray bars represent daily energy use totals and the red and blue lines represent the high and low temperatures for the day. Using the Usage Tracker bar graph, look for days when the temperature was relatively low, followed by days when the temperature increased significantly. You should see a drastic difference in electricity use, showing much lower usage on cool days verses higher usage on warmer days. If the differences in usage between the cool days and hot days isn’t drastic, that could indicate an issue with equipment or behavior that could be increasing your bill amount.