is 123 therms usage consider high for NG?

[dannieboiz]

I'm trying to figure out what's usage the bulk of our Natural gas bill. The only thing in our household that uses NG is the pool heater and the hot water heater and furnace. But the furnace isn't running this time of year so I've boiled it down to the other two.

I'm constantly hitting tier 2 on my gas bill. We're paying over $200 a month on natural gas. My water heater is 16 years old and is going to be replace soon. My pool heater is only on occassionally. I have a solar blanket and my heater only runs maybe a week combined of the month. I find it hard to believe that the pool heater cost over $100 to operate over a week period. It's also harder to believe that my hot water heater too cost over $100 a month to operate. Usually when one or the other is running, I can go to my mains and hear gas hissing through and when it isn't then it's quiet.

 

[danpik]

What BTU size is the pool heater? figure 1 therm/hour per 100,000BTU of heater size.

 

[chem geek]

123 Therms per month (I assume you are talking about one month) is around 4 per day and that is not high if you are heating your pool even a little bit. When we heat our 16,000 gallon pool with gas, it uses way more than that. During the winter, just the pool alone is around 12 Therms/day (360 per month), but that's with a non-insulating electric safety cover. With a bubble-type cover it might be half to two-thirds that much. During spring or fall it would be substantially lower in usage so your number sounds quite normal. Fortunately the weather now allows for solar only so that we're no longer using gas and probably won't need to again until October (usually it's mostly solar in June to September with May being iffy needing gas depending on the year, but we keep our pool warm at 88ºF).

Our gas usage during the summer so no gas pool heating and no gas air heat in the house is around 1.0 to 2.0 Therms per day which is for only the water heater, gas dryer, stovetop and oven.

 

[dannieboiz]

Heater is 44k btu. When u say 12 therms a day, thats 1 full day continuous?

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[danpik]

Heater is 44k btu. When u say 12 therms a day, thats 1 full day continuous?

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Are you sure on that size? that size heater on your pool at 100% efficiency could only manage to heat the pool at 1 deg/4 hrs. At 80% (which is likely) it would take at least 5 hrs to get 1 deg.

If so, I can see the heater on all day to keep the heat up.

 

[dannieboiz]

I don't know how I came up with 44k lol its a raypak p-r266a-en-c 266k btu

 

[chem geek]

That's better 266,000 BTU/hr. 20,000 gallons is around 167,000 pounds of water so that would be 266,000/167,000 = 1.6ºF per hour though it will be less than that since the heater is not 100% efficient. The heater usage would be 2.66 Therms per hour so you can see you don't have to run it very long to add to your regular gas usage and get to 4 per day.