[daepp]

A few more details:

All heating in our home (furnace, water) is by natural gas.

We do a ton of laundry considering their are five of us, two adults, and 17 (girl), 15 (girl) and 13 (boy). Lots of blow driers etc.

Washer and dryer are high efficiency.

I did find a broken plenum in the attic. Basically a large cube with 3 ducts attached. A whole side (one without a duct) had fallen/blown open. It was installed with the new HE system 2 years ago. The new system (along with a 14 seer compressor) uses two thermostats and various automated dampers to allow a multi zone system but only one blower and one compressor. The first summer it seemed to cut our bill in half (but I think it was also a milder summer than the previous one). The old system would never cycle off during the summer, so the new system seemed awesome.

This summer, looking back now, it seemed like the upstairs ran a whole lot - i just chalked it up to hear rising. Now I wonder if this mucked up my bill???