February, 2021 -- Electricity Bill

We live in a two-bedroom apartment in north Texas, a mile or so from DFW airport, north of Ft Worth, northwest of Dallas. 

We were certainly in the epicenter of the Texas February Freeze.

Readers probably heard all about the high energy bills that Texans were facing following the Texas Deep Freeze, February 15, 2021 - February 19, 2021. 

I was certainly eager to see the bill. We lost power for those four days, and I used very little power before and after those days. I have not turned on the heat since February 15 (the day we lost power) except for one eight-hour stretch on February 20, 2021. 

I'm not quite sure why our electricity usage was so high considering I did not turn on the heat at all, but we did have drying fans placed in the apartment for several days operating 24/7 to dry the walls. 

[They removed the baseboards throughout the apartment, removed the carpet and padding, and cut out the sheet rock (the walls) from the floors to about two feet above the floor to hasten the drying process.]

I assume the heating fans and the "destructive carpentry" accounted for a lot of the electricity. In addition, I did a lot of washing and drying of towels that I used to soak up water from the carpet before the carpet was finally removed.

We moved into the apartment during the summer of 2013. 

Except for one winter, back in 2015 or thereabouts our winters have been very mild, until this year. 

I used to be quite miserly using electricity; I watched it closely. However, starting about three years ago, I became a lot less concerned. I've noticed that the monthly bill does not vary a lot whether I watch electricity very closely or just use it without much concern. 

This is a history of MW used and cost of electricity for the past eight years, including this past February. For some reason, I did not record the data for 2016.