What is the average kilowatt hour use for an 800sq ft apartment?

Question

I have an apartment and I think someone is tapping into my electricity. My bill is crazy high and I keep the lights off. Whats going on?

Answer 1

Somewhere, there is an electric meter for your apartment. You need to find it. It is probably on the outside of the building and should be marked with your apartment number. There is a spinning disk on the meter that spins at a speed according to the amount of electricity you are using at the moment.

Once you have found your meter, go back to your apartment and turn off everything. Unplug the refrigerator, shut off all of the lights, make sure any electric heat or air conditioning is turned off, even unplug your clocks and alarms. You must turn everything off. Now go to your meter and look at the speed of the disk. It should be all but completely stopped. Even with everything turned off, it may move extremely (and I mean extremely) slow because of current leak or a hard wired smoke detector or the like which you can't (and shouldn't) turn off. If it is barely moving, you are probably OK and your bill is accurate.

If you have done all of the above, and the dial is moving at anything more tham a crawl, something, or someone else is using your power.

I have seen landlords that wired exterior security lighting, laundry facilities, basement common area lighting and heat, and many other electrical outlets into their tenants electrical boxes. It is not uncommon, but it is a ripoff of your power. You need to confront your landlord about the problem if you find the evidence.

You might wonder why you can't just turn off all of the circuit breakers to your apartment instead of turning everything in the apartment. If you simply turn off the main breaker to your apartment (assuming that you have access to the breaker box), you will also be shutting off the power to anything you do not use as described above. In that case, the dial on the meter will not indicate that there is any electricity being consumed and everything will look good to you. As soon as you turn on the main breaker again, you will be supplying power to everything hooked to your circuits, including power to things you are not responsible for.

Good luck with your investigation.

Answer 2

I went through something similar, if your water heater is using electricity, it accounts for a majority, another biggie is a dryer if you have one, third being your fridge and stove, depending on how much you use your stove.

I had enormous electric bills using perhaps 900 to 1300 KWs for the month. In the winter, if you have electric base board heaters, watch out, your bill will almost double again.

Usually if someone is tapping in for other purposes your KW/hrs would probably run past 3-10 thousand KW.

To be best sure, you can ask the utility for an average electrical usage for your apartment for the past year.