how much usuage did it show? if you have high per KWH charges, then yes it could have. more likely though is they may not read that meter all that often. my well is on it's own meter, and i wired up my workshop off it. some months the bill is just the base charge even when i know i used a lot of electric out there that month. then a couple months later the bill will be high, but correct for the amount of juice used over the preceding months. it is not uncommon at all for low usage meters to be read only once every few months. the rest of the time they just estimate it.

a friend of mine usually had a bill of around 450 a month during summer. this past summer her bills were 25.00 or less each month! she just paid them and thought nothing of it. i told her she better call, they had been mis-estimating and she was gonna be in for a real shock when te correct bill came. she got it last month, 1900.00! but it is what she truly owes. if she had called them back in July, she may have had to pay an extra 500 over her normal bill, but because she waited they finally caught back up and now she had to go borrow money to pay it.

Box fans often use shaded pole motors. Shaded pole motors are cheap to make, very durable if kept clean and reasonably cool. But they are very inefficient, consume lots of power for the work they do.

I have two box fans, well actually one is in a round plastic case. Extra Quiet!

One pulls 135watts on high, 75 on low, forget middle.
Other is about 10 watts less on each speed.

But anyhow if I ran both full time for a month it would be a bit under $25 in power at my .13 cents per kwh.

But anyhow if I ran both full time for a month it would be a bit under $25 in power at my .13 cents per kwh

and add to that the 20 base fee the OP pays and you get about what the bill was. people don't realize how much it costs to run something 24/7.

Thanks everyone,

My bill says I used 80 KWH (compared to 40 last year same time). Our rate was recently lowered to .072/KWH (getting rid of the tiered pricing). But I just called the REMC and they told me that our service rate just went from $16/mo to $33.60/mo!!! WOW!! Apparently the fans only cost me $5.77, but the service to it made the "distribution charge" $39.37.
Our barn/coop is separate from our house service, so we have to pay twice that every month, just for service.
Man this really stinks! I've heard it has something to do with a small city that they are building out here in the country. So long to the old, friendly, reasonable REMC.
Do you think this cost is pretty similar to other places??
Gosh.....if I factor out electricity/feed/coop, etc for my chickens, I figure each egg probably costs me about $100!
When we had our lines buried, the REMC guy told us that sometime in the future we might be able to get our barn and coop put on the same service as the house. Why couldn't we do that now? They both come off the same transformer.

yeah, i thought about putting my house and shop/well on the same meterr myself. the POCO originally put them on seperate meters for seperate structures, plus they would not shut off a well for non pay. if i did it i would save about 19.95 a month for the base fee per meter.

to do it, you would hav eto get an electrician to move you feed for the coop fromthe current meter to a slot in your existing main panel. the panel in the coop woul dhav eot be rewired to act as a subpanel, unless it is already that way, mine is since the disconnect is onthe pole with the meter.

call a couple of electrician and get them to come give you a price.

It is worse whre I am. On my last bill I used $12 worth of electric. The bill was $80.
They add on stuff like delivery charges, debt reduction, taxes etc. Delivery is the big one.
Also if I use 1Kw I pay for 1.019 Kw. They call it line losses.

joed...so they make you pay for their inefficient system???

Yes they do. Actual electric rate is government controlled. They need to make their money somehow.