Last night I got my utility bill and Holy Moly, it’s more than double last month’s thanks to a colder-than-normal month and an increase in utility rates. (Hey, Fed, I found your inflation.) Anyway, there has been a lot of interest in my previous musings on the ongoing cost tradeoffs of gas versus electric dryers. Since it’s been a few months, I thought I’d plug in the more recent numbers into a spreadsheet.
The summary: it still makes sense for me to have gas over electric.
Since August, everything’s gone up. Electricity, previously calculated to be $0.06872 per kilowatt-hour (above 600 kWh), is now $0.07145/kWh, or approximately 4% higher. Gas was previously $0.98655 per “therm” (see here), and is now $1.1286/therm, an increase of 14.4%.
Although gas has inflated (ha ha) faster than electricity, for my scenario of 8 loads per week, I break-even in 359 loads versus 323 loads. In the spreadsheet, I assumed a breakeven of less than two years made it compelling to go with gas; otherwise, electricity makes more sense. Please feel free to try your own local rates and numbers.