New to Electric Smoking

[jimmismoking]

I'm still a starter in the ring of electric smoking. I've used my smoker 2 times and have had really good turn outs with pulled pork. My question though deals more with power consumption. I got my first power bill and I was SHOCKED to say the least as it's a lot higher than it normal ever has been before. We have had a very mild winter up until today so I've keep my thermostat set at 69 in the house.

I'm using a MES 30' and it has a thermostat on it so I would think it would run much like a oven once a desired/per set temp is hit the heating element turns off?

At this point I was planning on not using the smoker for the rest of the month until I receive my next power bill to gauge if it's high due to usage or not.

Anyone else with this model noticed a spike in power bills? Maybe I might be placing blame on the wrong thing?

 

[scarbelly]

What is you weather like? Are you using the heater? My SmokinTex does not cause a rise in power bills or maybe I use it so much that I no longer notice it 

 

[jimmismoking]

Temps here have been in the 50's and 60's so the house has naturally been 70 degrees without the heat running. Good insulation

I did read that peak times can cause a hikes in bills so we might change some normal power usage things.

 

[eman]

The MES is not a power hungry piece of equipment.  used the 40" for almost 3 years and never noticed a difference in my bill.

 

[chef jimmyj]

You can very easily calculate the cost to run it...MES 30's have 800 Watt burners...So find the Cost per Kilowatt Hour on your Electric bill and multiply it times .8 for the Hourly cost to run with the MES coil heating. Actual cost will be lower because the Coil is not heating continuously.   Example in my area the price of Electricity is 7.77 cents per KWH

 $.0777/ KWH X .8 KW = $ 0.062   So for every hour the coil on a MES 30 is on full blast it would cost me 6 cents...

I have a MES 40 with a 1200W burner...

$.0777/ KWH X 1.2 KW = $ 0.093  I'm pretty sure it cost more than 9 cents an Hour to burn Charcoal in my NB Horizontal...A Ten Hour Pulled Pork for less than 90 Cents!...Pretty cheap Smokes!

I hope this helps...JJ

 

[sprky]

The watts on these type of smokers is small, I believe 1200 watts is the biggest. you would have to literally run this unit 24/7 to see a big difference in a bill.

Here is the calculation to figure out how much it costs to run one.

Wattage X Hours used / 1000 X cost per Kilo Watt Hour = cost to run

EXAMPLE

1200 watt unit       if your unit only has volts and amps listed watts is volts X amps

24 Hour run time

$0.13 per KWH (national average)             you can normally find out how much electricity costs per KWH on your bill.

1200 X 24 = 28800 / 1000 = 28.8  X .13 = $3.744

It just cost $3.74 dollars to run the unit 24 hours

1 week would cost $26.21

1 month would cost $104.83 (assuming 4 weeks)

I don't think the smoker is your jump in cost.

 

[SmokinAl]

Haven't noticed an increase here either.

 

[custom99]

I run my electric smoker alot and have never noticed any change in my bill. I have even left the element on for days by mistake and it did not hurt the bill. 

 

[jimmismoking]

Thank you all! I was really about to make an un-needed sacrifice of stopping the smoke. I don't know what is going but my bill has been going up each month by 50 bucks and I can't figure out why. I hope the smoke gods will forgive me for rash thoughts of blaming the electric smoker