Analyze Your Power Bill

Your electricity bill is not one number. It's a stack of separate charges — energy you used, fixed fees you pay no matter what, delivery costs, taxes, and sometimes surcharges you've never heard of. Before you can lower a bill, you have to know what's actually on it. This guide breaks down the line items, shows you how to pull your own usage data, and walks you through checking whether time-of-use pricing would help you or hurt you.

What's actually on your bill

Most residential bills mix several kinds of charges. Only some of them move when you change how you use power — the rest are fixed no matter what you do.

Line item	What it is	Does your usage change it?
Energy charge (¢/kWh)	The price per kilowatt-hour for the electricity you consumed	Yes — this is the one you control
Fixed service / connection fee	A flat monthly charge just for being connected to the grid	No — same every month
Supply vs delivery split	Supply = the electricity itself; delivery = moving it over the wires. Often billed as two separate ¢/kWh rates	Yes, both scale with usage
Tiered / block rates	Higher price per kWh once you cross a monthly usage threshold	Yes — heavy months cost more per kWh
Time-of-use periods	Different ¢/kWh rates by time of day (peak vs off-peak)	Yes — when you use power matters
Demand charge	A fee based on your single highest short-interval draw (rare on residential plans)	Yes, but driven by peaks, not totals
Taxes, riders, surcharges	Sales tax, public-benefit fees, fuel-cost adjustments	Partly — some scale with usage, some are flat

The key split to understand: the energy charge is the part you can move. The fixed service fee doesn't budge whether you run one light bulb or ten space heaters. So when you're trying to cut a bill, the energy charge — and on a TOU plan, when you rack it up — is where the leverage is.

Watch for the supply/delivery split especially. Many bills quote a low supply rate that looks cheap, but the delivery rate stacks on top. Your true cost per kWh is both added together.

Get your usage data

The single most useful thing you can do is pull your actual interval usage data — a record of how much power you drew, broken down by hour or by 15-minute block.

Where to find it:

1. Log into your utility's website and look for "usage," "energy use," "download my data," or "Green Button." Green Button is a standard export format most large utilities support.
2. Export the data as a CSV file. You'll typically get hourly or 15-minute readings covering a billing period or longer.
3. Save the file somewhere you can find it — you'll upload it in the next section.

If your utility doesn't offer a download, you're not stuck. You can still estimate: note your total monthly kWh from the bill and use the tools below to model where it's going.

What to look for in the data

Once you have interval data, three things tell you almost everything:

• Base load. The floor your usage never drops below — always-on devices like the fridge, router, standby electronics. If your overnight draw never goes under, say, 0.4 kWh/hour, that's your base load running 24/7.
• Peaks. The hours where usage spikes. On a flat rate these just add up. On a TOU plan, a peak that lands in the expensive afternoon/evening window costs far more than the same peak overnight.
• Biggest contributing devices. The spikes usually trace back to a handful of high-wattage loads — HVAC, water heater, EV charger, dryer. Those are the devices worth targeting.

Analyze it on PowerUsage

Rate Comparison — /compare

This is where the CSV pays off. The Analyze Your Usage Data import lets you:

1. Upload the CSV export from your utility.
2. Review, edit, and confirm the imported rows so the readings match your billing period.
3. Get your exact cost under a flat rate vs. a time-of-use rate for that period — computed from your real hour-by-hour usage, not an average.

Use the rate editor to enter your actual peak and off-peak prices from your bill, so the comparison reflects your plan and not a generic assumption. If you don't have a CSV handy, the page also runs a quick TOU-vs-flat estimate without one. Either way, you find out whether switching to (or staying off) time-of-use would cost you more or less.

Usage Calculator — /calculator

When you want to know which devices drive the bill, the calculator gives you the cost to run individual devices. Model your HVAC, water heater, EV charger, or anything else, and see what each contributes. This is how you turn a peak in your data into a named culprit.

Electricity Rates — /locations

Not sure what a normal rate looks like for your area? Look up your location's average rates here to sanity-check what your utility charges against the going price.

Putting it together

A typical workflow:

1. Read your bill and separate the energy charge from the fixed fees — know what you can actually move.
2. Download your interval usage as a CSV (Green Button if offered).
3. Upload it to /compare and enter your real rates to see flat vs. TOU cost.
4. If TOU wins, use /calculator to find which devices to shift out of the peak window.

If the comparison shows time-of-use would save you money, the next question is how to take advantage of it. That's a matter of moving high-wattage loads out of peak hours — see Understanding Time of Use Pricing and the worked timeshifting examples. If you want to shift your whole house at once instead of scheduling individual loads, look at Peak Shaving with a Battery.

The bottom line

A bill is only intimidating until you split it into parts. The fixed fees are fixed — ignore them. The energy charge is where your money goes and where you have control, and on a time-of-use plan the timing of that charge matters as much as the total. Pull your usage data, run it through /compare to see flat vs. TOU on your real numbers, and use /calculator to pin down which devices to target. You don't have to guess whether a rate change helps — you can measure it.