Today in Fortnightly

My electric bill this month is $53.41. For the 33 days through April 5^th, the electricity for our three-bedroom Victorian house cost $1.62 per day, or 14 cents per kilowatt-hour. 

We took just 383 kilowatt-hours from the grid. It's not much. The national average is nearly three times that amount. But this bill of mine covered parts of March and April when air conditioning isn't used.

My bills have been this way for six straight months, since mid-October of last year. We've been taking 353 to 409 kilowatt-hours per month. 

As we wrote yesterday, it's like Christmas in April. On Friday, the Labor Department came down the chimney with how much American households spent on pork, postage, pets, personal care products, pensions, and everything else during the year ending June 2015, including electricity.

This week's columns have analyzed the brand new Labor Department data on how much American households spent on everything during the year ending June 2015, including electricity.

The semi-annual Consumer Expenditure Survey is the source for understanding Americans' electric bills by region, income, age, urban/rural, etc. The government actually asks many thousands of households each quarter to track every single purchase. The credibility and detail, especially through mining the micro-data, is unequalled. 

Yesterday we looked at the cost of electricity in Wichita, Kansas in 1923. Today we'll look at the cost of electricity in Minneapolis in 1926, ninety years ago. 

Minneapolis General Electric charged ten cents per kilowatt-hour for the first three kilowatt-hours used over the course of a month, per room. Per room?

So the number of rooms in your home impacted your electric rate and bill. Because the utility charged seven and a half cents per kilowatt-hour for the next three kilowatt-hours. Again, per room.