I Tracked Every Utility Bill for a Year. Here's What Actually Costs Money.

I'm going to tell you something that makes me sound like a weird person, and I need you to understand that I am, in fact, a weird person.

I tracked every utility bill for a full year.

Every single one. Water, electricity, gas, internet. I made a spreadsheet. I color-coded it. I have charts. I am not proud of this, but I am also not *not* proud of it, because the data is genuinely useful and I'm going to share it with you so you don't have to be as weird as me.

This was in my last apartment, a three-bedroom in Portland. Three roommates. Me, a guy named Dave who worked in construction, and a woman named Priya who was a grad student. We split utilities evenly, which is what most people do, and which I now think is... fine, but not optimal.

Here's what a year of bills looked like:

**Electricity (averaged monthly):** - July: $184 (AC season) - August: $198 (peak AC) - September: $156 (still warm) - October: $112 (cooling down) - November: $98 (heat starts) - December: $134 (heat full blast) - January: $142 (cold) - February: $128 (moderate) - March: $106 (warming) - April: $94 (nice weather) - May: $102 (getting warm) - June: $156 (AC again)

Average: $134/month. Total for the year: $1,612.

**Water:** - Pretty steady, $45-52/month. Average: $48.

**Gas (heating):** - November-March spike. $30 in summer, $85 in winter. Average: $58.

**Internet:** - Flat $70/month. Comcast. Don't get me started.

Total utilities per month: $134 + $48 + $58 + $70 = $310. Split three ways: about $103 each.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. And by "interesting" I mean "the thing that caused a roommate argument."

Dave had a window AC unit in his room. A big one. The kind that sticks out the window and sounds like a helicopter taking off. He ran it pretty much 24/7 from June through September because he "runs hot."

I didn't think much of it until I started looking at the electricity bills. July and August were $184 and $198. That's $50-60 more than the spring months. Over four months, that's about $220 extra.

I did some rough math. A 10,000 BTU window AC unit running 12 hours a day costs about $40-50 a month in electricity. Dave was running his more like 20 hours a day. So yeah, he was probably responsible for about $45 of that extra $50-60 per month.

Over the summer, Dave's AC habit cost the household about $180 extra. Split three ways, Priya and I were each covering about $60 of Dave's cooling preference.

I brought it up. Not in an accusatory way — I brought up the *spreadsheet*. I showed Dave the numbers. I said, "Hey, so the electricity spikes in summer correlate pretty strongly with AC usage, and since you're the only one with a window unit, maybe we should adjust how we split summer utilities?"

Dave looked at the spreadsheet for a long time. Then he said, "Huh. I didn't realize it was that much."

He didn't realize. Because when utilities are split evenly, nobody feels the cost of their individual choices. Dave was running his AC 20 hours a day because it cost him the same $103 as it cost me, even though he was using way more electricity.

We ended up doing a hybrid split for summer months: base utilities split evenly, plus an AC surcharge for whoever runs a window unit. Dave paid an extra $40/month in July-September. The rest of us saved $13 each.

It was fair. It was transparent. And it only happened because I was weird enough to track a year of bills.

Here's what I learned that applies to everyone, even normal people who don't make spreadsheets:

**1. The biggest variable is always heating and cooling.** In most apartments, 40-60% of your electricity bill comes from HVAC. If one person is cranking the heat or running a personal AC unit, they're driving costs way up.

**2. Water is surprisingly stable.** Unless someone takes 45-minute showers every day (which, if they do, that's a different conversation), water bills don't vary much between roommates. Splitting evenly is usually fine.

**3. Internet is the easiest to split.** It's a flat rate. Just divide by people. Done.

**4. Gas follows weather, not people.** If you have gas heating, winter bills spike for everyone. Split evenly makes sense because everyone benefits from the heat.

**5. The real problem isn't the bills — it's the lack of transparency.** Most roommate utility fights happen because someone *feels* like they're paying too much, but nobody has the data to prove it. One person sees a $200 electricity bill and thinks "someone's running a bitcoin mining operation in their closet." The reality is usually simpler: someone has a window AC unit, or the baseboard heaters are ancient, or it's just July in Portland and everything is hot.

My advice? Don't track bills for a full year like a lunatic. Just have a conversation when bills spike. "Hey, electricity was $50 higher this month. Anyone know why?" Usually someone will say "oh, yeah, I've been running a space heater" or "my gaming PC is basically a space heater" and you can adjust from there.

And if nobody admits to anything? Get a smart plug and measure the actual usage. Data doesn't lie. Roommates sometimes do, but usually not on purpose — they just don't know.

— Jake

P.S. — Biscuit sits on my laptop when it's warm. He's basically a furry space heater that doesn't cost anything extra. 10/10 utility value.