Jac Shacter Shares His Home Energy Bills

Jac Shacter and his family walk the company talk with their own TerraWise home in historic Springfield. As Jacksonville's most energy efficient builder, the company designs to the highest energy efficiency with its standard included features. Jac's home offers a great test case for how efficiently TerraWise homes operate since it is a standard build of a popular plan where a family of five (plus several pets) live full time.

The house is a little over 1,700 square feet with three bedrooms and three baths on two levels. It was built in 2019. Since then, Jac and his wife welcomed a new baby girl, their third child, to the family. Jac's tracking of their thermostat settings show the house was kept between 66 to 68 degrees in winter and 72-78 during spring, summer and fall seasons, until May 2020. Since then, the house has been kept at 7o degrees on both floors all through the warmer months. The HVAC system is standard TerraWise issue without a PV Solar package. So as Jac says, "It's a good reflection of the exact houses the vast majority of our buyers own and occupy."

Jac shared several months of electric bills for his Springfield home, which are graphed in the adjacent charts. The top chart shows the monthly running JEA electric bills and the sharp rise after May 2020. The bottom chart shows the yearly average trends and even after the consistent lower thermostat cooling settings the house is still averaging in the $150s on electric bills per month.

"I have to admit we tend to keep the house on the cool side year-round, definitely below the DOE recommended settings," says Jac. "We like it cold and everyone seems to sleep better with the house colder so we probably could enjoy even lower monthly bills if we were more focused on it."

Jac said it's not uncommon for many of the older homes in Springfield to regularly average over $300 per month or higher on electric bills. The historic neighborhood has mostly older homes, with some that have been renovated. These older homes, even after renovations, don't come close to the energy efficiency designed and constructed into each home TerraWise builds.

"I am very pleased with how cost efficient our home is to operate," says Jac. "We previously lived in a small 750 square foot older home and the monthly electric bills averaged $120 so it's been great having more space, a better floor plan and great looking home all the while saving money each month."

Jac is planning a new home that is a custom Queen Ann style Victorian designed by him and wife Dakota. It is being built by TerraWise and is set to break ground soon. It will be one of the first grand Victorians built in Springfield since the original glory days of the historic neighborhood.

"We love living and working here in Springfield and are looking forward to demonstrating the custom side of TerraWise with our grand new home, says Jac. "This one will bring all the latest energy efficient designs into a classic Queen Anne that I think will become a showpiece for what is possible in Jacksonville's historic neighborhood from both a design and curb appeal standpoint and continuing trend of high energy efficient design."