So much depends on the house - if you go from a poorly insulated house to a well-insulated house twice the size your bills can drop.

When you find a house you like, as the current owner if you can see the utility bills.

I recall seeing an estimate of monthly utilities as part of the information on the listing. Of course you'd want to confirm any figure.

It depends very much on how you use heating, electricity, water. We use substantially less than our neighbors for basically the same house. They keep their house 72 degrees year-round, we don't but keep it cooler in winter and warmer in summer. We also use substantially less water because we don't water our lawn and have a low water use washer; also take a fair amount of showers at the gym :)

I agree that someone else's bills probably won't be accurate for your family. PG&E keeps telling us that we use the most electricity in our area. What they don't know - don't care - is that almost everyone else in our area work all day and so aren't using much electricity and gas. Whereas, we are here all day with medical equipment, lights, AC/heat, etc. running 24/7. You might ask your utility provider to figure such specifically for your family using several different scenarios.

Why is it any business of PG&E how much juice you are using? Tell them to go take a hike and mind their own business.

I am sure the comparison information provided by PG&E is similar to that sent from our provider. It simply shows a bar graph of the amount used per month for the past 12 months, and compares the current month to the same month of the previous year. Another note is how your usage compares to "similar" homes. It is useful information, available at a quick glance, for the consumer to use--PG&E really does not care how your usage compares to your neighbor's.

Well, I work from home, and yet, we're way below comparable homes. You might try to extrapolate from your current usage, combined with an energy audit of the house you're considering buying.

Since last Spring PG&E sends us a monthly usage statement, separate from our bill, telling us that we are using too much electricity and urging us to lower our usage. However, I like the idea of getting an audit done. Perhaps we have a big leak somewhere. Will do!

Do you know how energy efficient your current house is? If you are not sure, it would be good to find out some facts such as R-value of walls, ceiling, attic; type of windows, doors and window coverings; efficiency of appliances, heating cooling systems; house orientation ( facing east west, or north south), construction and landscapes...etc.

All of these make differences when estimate energy consumption in addition to your family's energy spending habits, such as room temperature kept in winter and summer..etc. and size of your house.

Once you understand energy efficiency level/facts of your current house, find out those of the potential new house, and use you current house as a baseline to compare and compute percentage of utilities increase in the new house....

This post was edited by azmom on Thu, Dec 4, 14 at 20:59

We get those charts from our power company too. We used to use a lot more than our neighbors but we were firing porcelain in an electric kiln to 2269 degrees once a week too.