65 is incredible low. I don’t lower it when we sleep as we have a baby.

Yes, please. If it's different, I can use that to try and lower my rate.

Our billing cycle resets in the beginning of the month, so we paid the new rate for the entire cycle.

We've thought about it, but our heat uses natural gas now so we're afraid to know how much electricity we'd use for a heat pump.

We do have a fireplace and had quite a few fires during the colder days last month, so I'm sure our bill would be higher if we hadn't. We can get the house to about 68⁰ with the fireplace and then the heat doesn't turn on until sometime the next day.

Yes, this was for December. I’ll let you know what January comes in at next week.

Just a note… I thought my electricity bill doubled this month too but when I looked closely the due dates for December and January overlapped so it wasn’t as high as it looked (still high compared to a year ago). For some reason, probably due to the new year holiday timing my December bill wasn’t due until like the 15th (ish?) but I got my January bill before I paid my December so the December bill was shown as a carry over. It was not late. I assume I’m not the only person with national grid that happened to.

A heat pump / A|C unit is wicked efficient … but uses electricity

Good. Glad you won't have to deal with that.

There is a section of the contract titled “applicable contract fees” and the only thing written in that section is “there are no termination fees associated with this agreement”

There's also the fact that the WRTA is not directly under the control of city government. The city council and various committees have much more control over where a parking garage goes than they do on the hiring of more bus drivers and restructuring of bus routes.

Is there a termination fee? I saw a few that had no cancelation fee but did have an early termination fee if you tried to get out of the contract early.

The contract they gave us is on 36 month terms with a clause that says there is no fee or repercussions for canceling early, and we are leaving this apartment in 5 months anyway so I didn’t really look into that much.

Looking at Zillow there are currently three condos for sale near downtown that are either directly on or within a tenth of a mile of Pleasant St, which has a bus route. Granted that's still not a ton of options but it's also the middle of winter. It's pretty near comparable to the number of options someone looking for a single family home in Newton Square or Tatnuck would be facing at the moment, for example. Or really just most single requirements imposed on a search would get you to that limited a selection.

But maybe there are other requirements that haven't been specified that limit the options even further.

I checked out some others from a link someone else provided. It seems like they get you with the auto renewal of the contract. Many contracts are a fixed price for the life of the contract, then variable pricing after the initial contract expires. So, if you have a 9 month contract at $.16/kwh, once the 9 months is up, they can charge you anything and change whenever they want.

I might still look into this, but I'll be calling them and having them send me a copy of the contract before signing up. I'd want to know how far in advance I have to say I don't want to renew, so I know if I'll end up screwed or not.

For what it's worth, where these and other apartments are being built (walking distance from the hub) is pretty much the ideal location to live in if you want to use the current bus system. Having basically any bus be able to take you home is a massive improvement.

I will say 68⁰ is kind of high. We're at 65⁰ during the day and I'm thinking of lowering it 1-2⁰.

Do you at least lower it at night when you sleep?

Oh, man. So sorry to hear that. I can't imagine paying that.

I will do this. I'd just hate if we found out there wasn't insulation because then we would need to take down replace the walls. The attic was a big enough job and it was blown in insulation. We did the attic ourselves so it was a lot of work and time.

Actually not. You can use a thermal heat detector and just point it at the wall.....it will be pretty obvious if the wall is empty. There are hand held versions and hardware that connect to your phone.

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I have that on mine. I'll ask my husband if he has that setup on his. Thank you.

Yeah. We switched out the attic insulation last year and got new windows this year. The only other thing is to check the insulation in the walls, but that would require us to take down and replace the walls in pretty much every room.

No but I’ve seen/know a creep who used to do this by Rewiring things on the side of the multi unit house. It’s dangerous to pull off. Maybe someone from national grid and come check?

Our new bill is 75 kwh less. We got our new windows the 3rd day of this newest billing cycle I'm referring to in the post.

Not sure. Do you know how you can check that?