Why am I paying for AC when I use DC ?

self ^ | June 20, 2026 | knarf, Tessla and Edison

[knarf]

I'm not smart enough to analyze this correctly, but most of my house is operating low voltage items . . . TV's, lap tops and a ton of smaller lights and stuff that all have those little black boxes for plugs.

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Conspiracy; Education; Science
KEYWORDS: electricity

[knarf]

We live in an all electric mobile home (not our choice, but my oil furnace one burnt down 8 years ago and this one came around cheap and immediately . . . which is what we needed at the time. The only real AC I use is 3W squiggle bulbs, Refrigerator, a two "burner" convection hot plate and my furnace in the winter.

How does my high electric bill translate from my low voltage and DC usage ?

We have an electric clothes clothes washer and dryer but we use the dryer maybe 4 times a year . . . we've learned how to naturally dry our clothes

I think I understand that AC is delivered to my house at 220V (no clue what the amperage is . . . but I don't use all that (I don't think)

Can someone explain all this to me ?

When I read my bill I see I'm charged for generation, delivery, and a bunch of stuff that looks like the deliverer FOR the delivery, the deliverer's mother in law, etc. (yes, NOW I'm being stupid . . . but I don't have the bill in front of me as I co9mpose)

[Fresh Wind]

“Tesla versus Edison: the conflict that gave us alternating current”

https://www.endesa.com/en/the-e-face/biographies/tesla-edison-war

[Steven Tyler]

Depends on your utility provider
I have a second home
I may go two months without drawing power.
I am charged a minimum for zero draw

Delivery, and other stuff is a fixed expense.
I pay that even when my variable expense is close to ziltch

[ComputerGuy]

Because Tesla was right and Edison was wrong.

[central_va]

I don’t think our electricity is metered anymore. They just average out by sq ft and charge us that way. I put in s “high efficiency” furnace and AC. No change in my bill YoY.

[quantim]

“TV’s, lap tops and a ton of smaller lights and stuff that all have those little black boxes for plugs.”

Those little black boxes are called DC rectifiers, you are indeed using AC current as these small black boxes convert from AC to DC. Older ones that are plugged in and not used much (like older phone chargers and laptops) are often called vampires as they suck current whether they are used or not, however not big draws.

Check your bill closely, likely you are being charges all kinds of things under different names, ours has a “distribution” segment which is often half the bill! These utilities code much of their billing under different segments to offload you a monthly bill even if you unplug the entire mobile unit, house, etc.

[ansel12]

What do you use the 3 watt squiggly for? Do you use any LED bulbs? How about space heaters?

What kind of electric bills do you get?

[Excellence]

For a house, you probably have access to 50 amps. Most circuit breakers are 20 amps. It's better to think in terms of watts. The relationship between volts, amps, and watts is defined by Watt’s Law: P (W) = V (V) × I (A) 50 X 220= 11,000 watts. That is what you have access to, not what you use. Even if you have devices that convert to DC, you're still using watts. Your electric company charges for watts. For a 20-amp circuit (your plugs are 120 V), multiply the volts by 20. Your watt rating at that plug within a circuit is 2400 watts. My space heater uses 1800 watts on high. At $0.1190 per kWatt hour, it costs $.21 per hour to run. (I'm in Texas) BTW, never load a circuit at more than 80% of the rated watts. Look at your bill. You are charged for the number of watts you use. The only way to save is by reducing the number of watts you use.

[central_va]

Reading your post caused banjo music to play in my head.

[major_gaff]

Due to the physics, the logistics required to deliver direct current (DC) to power
your house are not economically feasible. It requires tremendous amounts of energy to
push direct current through wire over long distances. This is not the case with alternating
current. Tesla showed this over a century ago and thankfully his system beat out Edison's.

[Adder]

You are using AC...AC comes to the meter...what you do with it afterwards doesn’t matter...

[Tell It Right]

I’m in a similar but opposite situation AC/DC wise. In my home I consume AC power, but most of the power coming in is DC from homemade solar and battery storage. The conversion from DC to AC has on average about 7% loss. The loss is much higher when I’m using less power (the conversion process of my inverters is more efficient at higher loads like when my HVAC is running while my dryer is running, etc). You have a similar loss, perhaps higher, converting incoming AC to DC.

[EVO X]

I think the issue maybe is the mobile home was configured to be used off grid with solar and also has standard AC hookups like a RV. If he is not hooked up to a solar source, all the power is coming from the power company.

[ansel12]

So far no experts have shown up, but as far as I know you have 110/120 volts coming into the house, not 220/240, you have at least one outlet for 220 for the dryer but that is put together inside the home for that one oddball dryer plug, you probably also have one for an electric stove, all the other wall sockets and light fixtures are normal 110/120 volt sockets.

[fruser1]

Any plug in the house with 4 prongs is using an extra “hot” wire. If you ran that much power on a hot single wire, the wire would get too hot. You can probably see the wiring at the breaker box. Don’t touch the wires though...

[norwaypinesavage]

You don’t sound ‘stupid’ to me, you sound uninformed. I hope this helps.
Your electric bill is based on the amount of electric energy you use each month. Electrical energy is measured in Kilowatt Hours and costs about 20 cents per kilowatt hour over all of the US, but varies from place to place. The owners of the meters, the wires, the poles, the ‘grid’, the generators, the repairmen, the tree trimmers, etc. all get a piece of those two dimes.

A Kilowatt is 1,000 Watts. A Kilowatt hour a thousand watts – roughly 10 hundred Watt light bulbs - running for an hour.

A Watt is defined as volts multiplied by amps, so those 10 bulbs running on a 110 volt plug for an hour would actually total 110*10 = 1100 Watt hours which is 1.1 kilowatt hours, so they would actually cost about 21 cents to run for an hour.

Whether you’re using AC or DC makes little difference. Energy is energy, regardless of this distinction. It’s easy to change AC to DC, but a bit more difficult and less efficient to go the other way.

The amount of electrical amps you can run through a wire is limited by the diameter of the wire. Thin wires will overheat and even melt when running too many amps through them. The power companies use very high voltages for service into your neighborhood so they can run thinner wires. Then they use transformers to change the voltage to safer 220 and 110 volt lines into your house. These transformers are highly efficient.

[Tell It Right]

I’ve seen videos on YouTube where people with solar panels actually end up paying the utility company MORE...... mostly California of course.

That is about 90% true for home solar users who sell power to the grid. If, however, you don’t put power onto the grid because you have hybrid inverters that allow you to disable the grid sell feature, then having solar doesn’t make you incur extra fees. You’re simply a normal power customer like everyone else except you pull from the grid less power (lower power bills).

Put another way, for the first year I had solar, about 50% of the power we consumed was power that the utility had no clue about because it didn’t come through the meter. I didn’t tell the utility about my solar — what I did on my side of the meter was my business. A year later I added onto the solar, converted my 2 natural gas appliances to electric, and replaced my wife’s old gas crossover with an EV crossover. End result, for the next year about 80% of our power consumed is homemade (doesn’t pull through the meter), but it’s now for an all electric home and includes driving about 1,500 miles per month on home charged miles.

Only after having that upgrade for a year to study how efficient it is for our climate and power consumption habits did I do the math on the telemetry to realize that selling power to the grid would net me a little more than the extra costs. But even that was only after digging through the regulations and rate plan options to find one that’s best for my numbers. So I’ve been selling power to the grid with Alabama Power for almost 3 years. My past 12 power bills averaged $73/month (no natural gas bill and little gasoline cost with the little we drive the gas pickup). Again, part of the beauty is that most of my energy consumption isn’t regulated because it doesn’t go through the meter. My main two regulators are the two I can count on the most: God’s in charge of giving us sunlight and I’m in charge of how that solar energy is stewarded.

[fruser1]

You’re running at least two things a lot - refrigerator and water heater.

If you don’t have public water and are using a well, the pump for that is electric and if you’re using a reverse osmosis system, instead of just adding salt to a tank, that’ll be burning noticeable power too.

For your DC devices, touch the little black boxes on the power cord or the device itself if there isn’t one. The hotter it is the more power you’re using.

You’ll probably see your WiFi router is pretty warm. You can unplug that overnight, which is a good idea security wise anyway.

The power company that bills you is just part of the system. They don’t even necessarily own any generation equipment. The companies that own the generators are not even the folks that own the big power lines.

How all those companies sort out billing among themselves is terribly complicated and involves annual bidding processes.

You wind up paying for power even if it’s just sitting there available. There’s even a separate meter charge usually.

[DFG]