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When calculating Average Monthly Energy Costs, there are some issues to deal with. If you are going to use this data, you should make an effort to understand the underlying issues.
Many people are not billed for energy costs, because they are included in their rent or condo fees. Because of this, their energy fees are irretrievably buried in the census. If these people were included in the tabulation, they would make it appear that average monthly energy costs were much lower than they truly are, and if a simple tool is used to perform the tabulation (a tool which cannot exclude those with no energy bills), this will result in misleading numbers.
Additionally, some people have their heating bill rolled into their electric bill. Some of those have electric heat, and others use gas for heat, but are billed by the electric company. In these cases, there is no way to separate the electric bill from the gas bill.
In order to deal with these issues, Innovative Computing takes the following steps:
- Households which have heat or electric costs covered by rent or condo fee, or are otherwise not billed for heat or electric are excluded from tabulations where cost is a factor.
- A new data item, EnergyCost, has been created by aggregating average monthly electric charges, average monthly heat fuel charges, and 1/12 annual other fuel costs.
- "EnergyCost" now represents the total average monthly energy costs for the households for whom energy costs can be established. "EnergyCost" is used to perform the tabulations where "Heating Fuel Cost" or "Electric Cost" would be misleading.
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