Our August electric bill was $373. I paid it, typed it into the household tab of the spreadsheet, and then sat looking at the number in the next column: 2,420 kWh. That is what it takes to keep a 1983 brick ranch at 76 degrees through a Dallas August with five people, a heeler who sheds on everything, and an oven I mostly left off. Not long after, a letter showed up saying our 12-month fixed plan would end October 15. If we did nothing, we'd roll onto a renewal price that, once I worked it out, was a little over 17 cents a kWh all-in. We had been paying about 15.4.
So in late September I did what I do with anything that has a receipt attached. I made a tab.
Starting with our own twelve months
Before I looked at a single plan, I pulled a full year of usage from our old bills. Our lowest month was March at about 900 kWh, our highest was that August, and September came in at $298. All told we used roughly 18,400 kWh over the year, and close to half of it went to June through September.
That spread matters in Texas, because a lot of plans are priced to look great at one usage level and much less great at others. A plan that's cheap at exactly 1,000 kWh can be expensive for a house that uses 900 in spring and 2,400 in August. I wanted to know what each plan would have cost us, month by month, last year.
How I used Power to Choose
Power to Choose is the state's comparison site for areas like ours, where you pick your own electric provider. You put in your zip code and it lists the plans offered there. I filtered to fixed-rate plans between 12 and 36 months and ignored the default sort, because the price shown up front is the average at 1,000 kWh.
Then I opened the Electricity Facts Label for every plan that looked close. The label is a standard one-page document that lists the energy charge, any monthly base charge, the delivery charges from Oncor (which every plan in our area passes through), the contract length and the early termination fee. These are the things that knocked plans off my list:
- Bill credits tied to a usage window. Several plans take a flat credit off the bill only if you use between, say, 1,000 and 2,000 kWh. We'd blow past the top of that window all summer and fall under the bottom in spring.
- Minimum usage fees, which charge you for using too little.
- Variable or indexed rates, which can move whenever the market does.
- Free nights or free weekends plans. Our heavy use is the AC from 3 to 8 p.m., when the free hours don't apply and the daytime rate is higher to make up for them.
The four that made it, and what we signed
Four plans survived. For each one I built a column that ran our actual twelve months through its facts label: energy charge times our usage, plus the base charge, plus Oncor's charges. Then I added up the year.
The winner was a 24-month fixed plan that works out to about 13.6 cents a kWh all-in at our usage. At last year's usage, that's around $2,500 for the year instead of about $2,830 on our old rate, roughly $330 less. Our $373 August would have been about $329. The early termination fee is $150, and I wrote it in the spreadsheet next to the end date so I never have to dig for it.
One 12-month plan came in about a tenth of a cent cheaper. I passed on it, and that was a judgment call, not math. I didn't want to be back at this table next October guessing where rates would go, and two years of a known price is worth something to me when I'm budgeting groceries a week at a time. The tradeoff is real: if prices drop next year, we're locked in, or we pay the fee to get out. I'm fine with that.
The new plan starts October 16 and runs to October 2027. I put a reminder in my phone for August 2027 so I'm comparing again before the contract runs out instead of after.
What this has to do with dinner
Back in June I plugged our appliances into a $25 meter and found that the cooking itself costs pennies. An oven dinner was about 32 cents at our old rate. On the new rate it's about 29. Changing the rate did more for our bill in one evening than a whole summer of skipping the oven. The AC is the real load in this house, and the kitchen is a rounding error next to it.
All of this is one household's math on its own numbers, not a recommendation. Plans, fees and delivery charges change, so if you're shopping, read the facts label and the contract for any plan you're considering, and ask the provider your questions before you enroll.
Matt's only question when I told him was whether the savings meant the thermostat could go down to 74 next summer. I told him I'd put it in the spreadsheet.
