August 2022 - The CharlesWorks Corner

The CW Corner – Saving Money on Your Electric: PSNH/Eversource Electric Bill

by Charles Oropallo | Aug 21, 2022 | Do-It-Yourself, The CW Corner

Many costs for energy have risen in recent months. Here in the Northeast our electric bills just suffered a 110% hike. The change was this:

OLD RATE pre 8/1/2022: 10.669¢ per kWh (kilo or thousand watt hours)
NEW RATE post 7/31/2022: 22.566¢ per kWh

I operate CharlesWorks from my home. So this applies to home services. We run many web servers and computers here so the electric rate increase resulted in an immense change.

Doing the Research

The biggest hassle I ran into was simply understanding my electric bill. The monthly electric bill has gotten quite complex. There are two basic parts to my electric bill:

Supplier: This is the part of the electric bill that just increased from 10.669¢ to 22.566¢ per kWh. This is the part that we can shop around for better pricing on.
Delivery: This is the part of the electric bill that will remain constant. This seems the most complicated because there are a number of components (8 on my bill) listed in this. The total on my bill for these delivery charges ended up at 12.21¢ per kWh. Whatever this total amount is on your bill should not change should you switch suppliers. So this cost should remain the same.

I did a lot of research on this. Hopefully this will save you the hassle of researching. Ultimately, I discovered that the process is, like many things we study, learn and practice, quite straightforward.

To switch my electric supplier there were a couple of prerequisites I needed assurance of:

That my electric bill was actually going to go down. Sounds over-simplistic but I am cautious when it comes to ongoing expenses.
That there were no cancellation fees should I change my mind if the power rate were to lower. I’ve not really seen that happen before – but just in case.

Moving to Direct Energy

I decided to switch to Direct Energy. After a lot of researching around and talking to several others, I found they were the best of all worlds:

LOW RATE: Direct Energy offers the lowest kilowatt hour rate at 16.59¢ kWh which was the lowest I could find.
NO CANCELLATION FEE: Direct Energy offers switching to a 36 month contract with no cancellation fee should I move away. Most other companies I researched imposed at least a $100 cancellation fee.
REFERRAL FEE: Direct Energy offers a referral fee. If you refer someone else to them who signs up they will give you a $50 referral fee. You can’t go wrong there. Mine is http://www.directenergy.com/refer-a-friend/raf/D866981 and if you click on that you can get started saving like I did.
$50 FOR SIGNUP: At the time of this article Direct Energy is offering a $50 Visa Prepaid Card for signing up using a friend’s referral – so you can get this by using my referral code.

Here is the information you will need to switch over to Direct Energy. You should have this info handy when you sign up. It is all on your current electric bill:

ACCOUNT NUMBER: You’ll need your current electric or gas bill Account Number. On my bill it was listed on the upper left corner of the first page.
CUSTOMER NAME KEY: You’ll need what is called the Customer name key. On my bill it is 4 letters located in the upper left corner of the second page of the electric bill.

So switching really was a no brainer in light of the worst PSNY/Eversource electric power rate increase I have ever seen.