Anyone see their Dec Utility Bill yet?

[Nictuku]

20. PGE Bills make me think I'm not very intelligent

I can barely understand the PGE bill. There are delivery charges and then I'm on this MCE Generation thing, and I received a notice that in March PGE is changing their billing (I doubt it will be more understandable)

When comparing, the bill this year was only $46 higher than last year, which is bizarre because we burned a lot of firewood to keep the upstairs warmer (again, thanks to my wonderful cousin who brought us wood). But I had the ceramic wall heaters on 24/7 downstairs and mom has one in her room too. They add up I guess.

This is what I found on the bill (I don't even know what this means to be honest)
Total Usage
1,295 kWh

Last yea same billing period:
1,190 kWh

I just get more confused when I look at these bills. Last year Dec was about $46 less than this year same time. I don't understand it because like I said, we did use a lot of firewood to heat the upstairs. It makes me think that the billing doesn't actually have anything to do with how much you use, they seem to estimate based on how many rooms, how many people, what kind of water heater, etc. It would take a lot to convince me that it is not a racket.

In the last couple of years, we did replace an old frige with a new one, and we also replaced old washer/dryer with new ones too. Oh, and again, when our water heater started leaking my cousin replaced that with a new one, that was a couple of years ago.

In writing all this, it makes me appreciate my cousin all the more.

So, we had no power for 2 days in last billing cycle, and it did include 1 more day in cycle than last year. I can't remember if we had power outages for same billing period last year. It happens a lot up here. Again, thanks to my cousin who gave us this little Honda generator that gets us through (no heat, but at least we have the fridges and internet/tv during the outages)