Frequently Asked Questions

Duke Energy developed this report for customers to help them understand their energy usage. The report simply compares your home's energy efficiency over time to similar homes in your community.

Duke Energy compiled energy usage and publicly available information (location, size, home age, and number of occupants) on nearby similar homes to develop the comparison. However, public information sometimes becomes outdated as homes are renovated or situations change. If the information on your report appears to be incorrect, please provide us the correct information by contacting us or calling 888-873-3853, so it can be updated for future reports.

The report only accounts for a household’s electricity use, so the costs for gas are not included. Note however, you are only being compared to similar homes that are like yours, so we do not compare an all-electric home to a gas-heated home.

They are likely taking a variety of savings actions including adjusting thermostats to manage heating and cooling costs; turning off lights and home electronics when not in use; running only full laundry and dishwasher loads; or installing a more efficient heating/air conditioning system or water heater. Find out more ways to save here.

Yes, these are real households. For this report, we use a scale of 1-100 to rank all the homes that are similar to yours. The “Average Home” represents the ones in the middle of the pack, performing at the 50% mark. The “Energy Efficient Home” represents households that fall at the 25% mark, which means that 25% of the homes in your comparison spend this amount on energy (or less!)

Because everyone is on a different billing cycle, we multiply your actual usage (in kilowatt hours) over a fixed, common time period with the average residential rate to calculate the costs shown on your report.

A kilowatt-hour means one kilowatt (1,000 watts) of electricity produced or consumed for one hour. One 100-watt light bulb left on for 10 hours consumes one kilowatt-hour of electricity (100 watts x 10 hours = 1,000 watt-hours = 1 kilowatt-hour).

When customers reduce their energy usage, it reduces the costs to provide energy and the need to build more power plants in the future, which actually lowers bills for everyone.

No, all the comparison information is aggregated to create your report. Your specific information and home characteristics are not shared with others.

Please contact us or call 888-873-3853 if you need further assistance.