Cold Weather: Seasonal Home Energy Efficiency Tips

When winter weather turns cold, customers often turn to their thermostats.

As the temperature outside becomes more extreme, so do electric bills, particularly for those customers who use electricity to heat their homes or businesses or customers with swimming pools. It can be quite a shock to see your electric bill after winter begins. Immediately, customers may say to themselves: Is this correct? Why is it so high? That can’t be right!

As a result of these higher electric bills, we see a significant increase in REP/Customer requests to perform meter tests and meter re-reads. Many people suspect their high bills are caused by inaccurate or broken meters. However, Oncor meters are highly reliable and accurate. In fact, between 2013 and 2017, Oncor tested approximately 58,000 meters at our customers’ requests. 99.90% of the tested meters met the industry’s strict standards for accuracy. As you can see, testing the meter rarely results in lower electric bills or resolves the customers’ concerns. The most likely cause of the unexpectedly high bill is the outside temperature.

Oncor has developed an online Seasonal Billing training module that provides helpful tips for call center agents and customers to assist in understanding and minimizing the impact of extreme temperatures on electric bills. The training module takes about 10 minutes to complete and can be found at: Oncor Training. Smart Meter Texas is another good source for use by call center agents and customers to review and obtain current meter reading information and it can be found at: Smart Meter Texas.