One of the features that helped convince me to move into our old apartment building was that it was a LEED certified building. Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) certification verifies that a building is constructed in a way that achieves "energy savings, water efficiency, CO₂ emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts."

One benefit of this is that LEED certified buildings are healthier to be in, use less energy, and cost less to operate. The benefit to us at our old apartment was that we hardly ever used our heater and that our appliances cost less to use.

Our current apartment building was constructed a couple decades earlier, so it's not as efficient. Our unit is also larger, so there's more air that needs to be kept warm in the winter. And we face east, so we don't get the afternoon sun to keep us warm. All that means that we are using our heater a lot more than at our old place. At our old place, we needed to turn our heater on for about one week out of the entire year. At our current place, we're running the heater pretty much every day.

Also, the washer and drier at our current apartment are about half the size or 2/3 the size of our old ones, so we're having to run them a lot more often. We do have a deck, so we may look at drying some things outside in the summer.

Anyway, we've now gotten our first electric bill here and our energy use per day is about 75% more than what we used at our old place - we're using about 14 kWh per day instead of the 8 kWH we used at our old place. Fortunately, we'll be using our heater less in the coming months so our energy use should decrease. Also, our energy only costs about 4.6 cents per kWh, so electricity still isn't going to be much more than $30 per month.