Before you blame FPL: a seven-day meter test for an Ormond Beach bill that jumped

The experiment

FPL’s smart meters display cumulative kilowatt-hours; the number is on the face of the meter and in the FPL app. For seven evenings at the same hour, write it down along with the day’s high temperature and a note about anything unusual: company over, a rainy day, a day the house was empty. Subtract each day from the one before. You now have seven daily usage figures and the weather that went with them, and that pattern is more useful than the bill.

Reading the seven numbers

Usage tracks the heat closely. Hot days high, the rainy 82-degree day noticeably lower. The air conditioner is the main load and it is responding normally to weather. If the total is still much higher than last year’s, the system is working harder than it used to for the same result, which points to efficiency loss: a dirty coil, low refrigerant, leaking attic ducts or a tired compressor. That is a tune-up and diagnosis visit.

Usage is high and flat, barely moving with the weather. Something is running regardless of how hot it is. In Ormond Beach the common culprits are a pool pump on a round-the-clock schedule, an old refrigerator in the garage, a well pump cycling on a failed pressure tank in the western part of the county, or, inside the air conditioner, electric heat strips energized when they should not be. That last one deserves its own section.

Usage jumped on a specific day and stayed up. Something failed or changed on that day. A capacitor that half-failed and left the compressor laboring, a thermostat replaced and miswired, a storm and a brief outage that reset a smart thermostat to a factory schedule. The date is your clue; tell us when you call.

Have the numbers read by a technician

The summer heat-strip trap

Nearly every heat pump in Ormond Beach has electric backup heat strips in the air handler for the few cold mornings a year. A stuck sequencer, a shorted thermostat wire or a control board fault can turn them on while the system is cooling. The compressor then fights the strips: the air at the vents is cool enough that nobody notices, the house holds temperature, and the FPL bill doubles. A thermostat that shows “aux” or “emergency heat” in August is the obvious version; the silent version needs a clamp meter on the strip circuit, which takes a technician a minute. This single fault accounts for more of the shocking Ormond Beach bills we see than any other, and the fix is often a relay.

When the bill really is the air conditioner

If the seven days track the weather and the total is simply too high, the losses are inside the system, and in a town where the median house dates to 1984 they stack up:

• Attic ducts leaking. Return leaks pull 125-degree attic air in; supply leaks blow cold air into the insulation. The system runs longer every hour of every day.
• A coil fouled with mold film. Every indoor coil in a 73-degree-dew-point climate grows it; a fouled coil moves less heat per minute of run time.
• Low refrigerant. A slow leak at a corroded fitting on a beachside or riverfront system means the compressor runs longer to do less.
• An outdoor coil choked with oak debris or salt. Heat cannot leave, pressures climb, the compressor draws more current.
• An oversized or single-stage unit cycling constantly. Starts are expensive; a system that starts every eight minutes pays for each one.
• A compressor near the end. Amp draw climbs as the compressor wears, and the bill climbs with it.

What the visit looks like

The technician checks the heat strips and the thermostat wiring first because it is fast and expensive if missed, then measures compressor and blower amp draw, refrigerant pressures, airflow and the temperature drop across the coil, and inspects the attic ducts. You get a list of what is costing you and what each fix would do, in order of payback. Some of it is a tune-up. Some of it is duct sealing, which FPL’s rebate program may help with. And on a system past fifteen years with a compressor drawing well over its rating, we will tell you that the FPL Residential HVAC Program rebate on a high-efficiency replacement, plus the monthly saving, may make the new unit cheaper to own than the old one. Call 866-266-5709 with the seven numbers in hand; we drive down from our Palm Coast headquarters with the clamp meter.