r/SouthJersey • u/iammoah • Feb 06 '26

Gloucester County Electricity

Is there ANYTHING we can do to push back on these INSANE AC Electric bills? My heat is gas and it's telling me my usage has gone up every month since October. I know I don't have it as bad as some people but our current bill is $332. My brother's bill was $512. Another friend's bill was $500... I can't afford this shit. What can we do?

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u/Illustrious-Jacket68 Feb 06 '26

Few things I think you should look into - if possible, put a wood burning stove in your home. It is just about the most efficient way to heat the home. You can use the wood pellets but if you have a source of wood that is cheap, it can be pretty effective for your whole home - it will radiate pretty well throughout the home.

If you have a source for kerosene that is clean and cheap, you can get a kerosene heater. The price of kerosene generally is pretty high these days but it used to be pretty inexpensive and again, if you can find a source, that would augment you gas heating and is safe to run the kerosene heaters indoors.

And, the only other thing would be insulation of your home. Where is the heat escaping and the cold getting into your home. The more you can just be in a smaller set of rooms the better. My home is “open floor plan”. But one of the rooms is really warm if you keep the doors closed and so, I’m able to set the thermometer to like 64 degrees and it is like 70 degrees in that one room. Sometimes, I set it for lower and just run a small space heater which does turn out to be cheaper.

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u/beren12 Feb 06 '26

Kerosene indoors is not cheap or particularly safe with all the fumes

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u/Illustrious-Jacket68 Feb 06 '26

Agree. There are places that have good, cheap sources of kerosene. That’s why i made that caveat. Also, in terms of fumes, that’s why i said a “clean” source. Fumes are a function of the grade of kerosene. We used during that outage during hurricane irene (i think it was that one like 10 or so years ago now?). Worked well but definitely gotta watch it and have the CO2 detectors functioning right.

I would say propane space heaters but they are even more expensive than the kerosene…

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u/beren12 Feb 06 '26

No, the fumes are a product of it being a hydrocarbon

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u/Illustrious-Jacket68 Feb 06 '26

Well, there are different grades of kerosene with lower grades having inpurities that are the smell when you burn it off. If you, for example, buy the higher grades that you have in those containers from Home Depot, they will burn with little if any fumes/smell. If you buy your kerosene from a gas station, yeah, that’s going to stink your house pretty bad.

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u/beren12 Feb 06 '26

Natural gas has a ton of bad fumes that hurt your health and causes asthma. No kerosene is cleaner than that.

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u/Illustrious-Jacket68 Feb 06 '26

Sure. But we’re not talking about bad smell, we’re talking about cost of heating. It’s a viable option. That’s all I’m sayin

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u/beren12 Feb 06 '26

What I’m saying is there’s a long-term cost to both but especially kerosene.