Did the power company change the meter?

The electric company did replace my meter a couple months before the change with a digital smart meter. Perhaps is is my usage. Around the same time my son moved the washer and dryer from the basement to the first floor and I have been hanging the majority of my laundry outside to dry instead of using the electric dryer.

The dryer is a heavy user of power. If you do less dryer loads you definitely will notice it. When we switched to a gas dryer we saw the same thing.

Most likely the reduced dryer use is where your lower bills are coming from. Count your blessings, and be glad you don't live in a neighborhood where short-sighted rules prohibit drying laundry on good old fashioned clotheslines.

Another possible contributor is that with the new meter you might have been moved onto a different rate plan, whether you realized it or not. New smart meters present more opportunities for the power company to charge you more -- and sometimes less -- for the same usage.

Some really old meters didn't have a peak demand logger (I still have one of these grey ladies on my house.) In such cases the power company might look at what high-load appliances you had, such as an electric water heater, and make assumptions about what peak load to expect (the higher your peak load, the more you pay per kWh that month). If your actual peak load is lower than their estimate, getting a meter that measures it could reduce your bill, even if your actual kWh usage stayed the same.

PS - be glad you're rid of that FPE panel. A web search for "Federal Pacific Panel Fires" will tell you why. Square D (especially the QO series) are much better panels.

First thing I thought was that the Federal Pacific panel has to go. Glad you got rid of it. Thank you for hang drying!

I call my set-up a solar-powered clothes dryer. It has the best ROI of any renewable energy technology that I know of.