I forgot to mention that all of the wiring and permanent appliances & features (such as furnace, hot water heater, septic) are from 1997 or later, the last of which was installed in 2003. Our house has 90 AMP service. It was totally gutted to nothing but the frame, floorboards and rafters and remodeled. It didn't have running water (just a manual pump surface well) or a septic, and only had 2 outlets and an electric toilet. All the old electric was completely replaced with quality, modern stuff and was done very well and far surpassed code. There is only 1 problem, which is that there are 2 underground conduits running wire to two outdoor lamp posts which, though I replaced the switch and lamps themselves, no longer work. I know it's the wiring somewhere, could this be leaking my juice to ground?

Look at the bill, was it a meter read or estimate? They used to read the meter every other billing cycle, but now they do it almost every cycle with the wireless meter read equipment. If an estimate, they caluclated on past usage, and next month should be lower by two months delta! It should say on the bill somewhere if it was a read or estimate. You can also call in your reading yourself. Good luck

It says "actual read" on the bill. We also have one of those analog meters, but it is from the late 90's and has a rather large circuit board on the front of it that obviously weren't there when i was growing up. I was thinking it could be a sending unit, since I am home literally all day every day and I don't recall ever having seen or heard the meter reader or his vehicle. My oversensitive dogs haven't heard him either. :-/

old fridge running all the time could be one culprit. another could be the lamp posts, if the wires are partially grounded, but if that were the case i would think that the meter would be moving some at all times.

read your meter, if possible read it every day. write the readings down, and then compare them to the bill.

an electric water heater will use a good bit of juice, but unless you use tons of hot water and it is constantly having to reheat cold water, it should not be that bad.

Check your usage over several days with everything as it is now. Then disconnect the wires running to the lamp post at the switch and monitor the usage for the same amount of time. See if there is an appreciable difference.

I'm curious about leaking electricity to ground...Can that happen? Are there other "leaks" that can be traced and eliminated? How?

Some background on my mystery usage:

We are fortunate to have a weekend house and a weekday house. Our weekend house uses 4-5x the amount of electricity as our weekday house. I can't figure out why. Needless to say we are only in the weekend house 2 nights per week and the weekday house 5 nights per week (on average). Weekdays the two flat screen TVs and associated stereo equipment are on 4-5 hours a day. Weekend house has no TV or stereo...The range/oven and dryer is gas at both houses, the heat and hot water is oil at both. Except for the weekend house being larger (but not 4x larger), all else is fairly equal. I never understood why the weekend house sucked more electricity than the weekday house. I even purchased an electricity meter that plugs into the wall to compare the electric usage of the refrigerators...exactly the same! No all night on lights at either house. Any help?!

This is pretty significant for us since electricity is 19 cents a kilowatt hour in CT!!

Because the neutral of your electrical service is grounded for lightning protection, a grounded appliance with defective insulation can cause a current to flow even when the appliance is off. I had a refrigerator which did this when the automatic defrost heating element ruptured; sitting in the dirty water in the clogged defrost tray, the element created a somewhat high resistance path to the refrigerator's metal frame. Nobody was shocked since the frame was grounded. The current simply flowed to ground. It wasn't a high enough fault current to trip the breaker, so it was months before I realized anything was wrong.

Breaks in the insulation in underground cables can also cause this. In extreme cases you'll see snow melt off the ground above, but a lower current leakage won't show many if any such symptoms.

I have heard of water pumps causing this kind of leakage, too.

Even a small leakage current can be a real energy waster since it is happening 24 hours a day.