Pioneer Woman at Heart

One Flourishing, Frugal and Fun Family!

One family learning to live off the land, cut back on expenses, and to live a simpler and a more self-sufficient lifestyle.

Adopted Motto

"Eat it up,
Wear it out,
Make it do,
Or go without."
~A Pioneer Sampler, by Barbara Greenwood~

Friday, June 17, 2011

Sad Report for On-line Earnings ~ Rising Electric Costs

After eHow removed their writer's compensation program, I lost one of the highest revenue earning opportunities I had.  
Bukisa, a while back, hooked their revenue earnings to anyone's Google adsense account.  When they could not get my account to "hook up" and stopped replying to my inquiries, I removed my articles from their site also.  And that leaves me with ListMyFive.com.  Last month, my earnings dropped about 75% from the previous month, and absolutely no earnings for June so far.  That leaves me with one site - Helium.

I will be looking at other sites now, and looking into other freelance sources of income.  With my income down, I must search out ways to lower our costs even more. 

I have gotten our electric bill down to $64.00 before, but it has yet to get that low again.  I'm not sure why, other than it could be the water pump kicking on to water the garden, and the oven from baking bread.

When I say $64.00 for our bill, the actual amount of usage cost is about 1/2 of that.  The other half is:

$4.00 - Customer Charge (what for?  I have no idea)
$35.64 - Distribution Related Component (again, for what?)
and then there are cost recovery charges and then....and then....after all of that....the usage cost.

However, on my current bill, I read:

"The Public Utilities Commission of ***** in Case ****** approved a DSE2 (what??) charge of 0.2008 cents per kWh.  Effective May 18, 2011.

Ironically, this goes into effect during the months when most people run air conditioning.   It would be nice if they could put it in terms we could all understand, because I have no idea what the DSE2 stands for.

We have the highest electric in our county.  The absolute highest, and it's really getting out of control.  We are seriously looking into a wood burning stove for the kitchen.  And it's not out of the realm for us to hook propane to the stove vs. electric also.  Although those costs are rising also.  So again, we are back to the wood burning cook stove.

I have found 3 appliances that we can unplug when not in use.  It may help cut back that increase we've been slapped with.

1 comment:

Candy C. said...

Wow! If you called them do you think they would explain all those "extras" in terms that regular people could understand? Hope you are able to find a new income source.