Does anyone have a CLUE how much my gas bill might be?
Be grateful you don't have an electric range, they're generally more expensive. It stands to reason. If you pump the gas into your house, you just burn it. But when you pump the fuel into a power plant, they have to convert the heat energy into kinetic energy, then convert the kinetic energy into electrical energy, then run it through a bunch of energy-wasting transformers, then into your house... and your stove converts it right back into heat energy! Hard to think of a more inefficent process!
Also, if I call the gas company and explain to them what happened, do you think they will make me pay?
You just said that to give us a laugh, right?
try the bill for the ashes of the house.
You can't burn your house down with your oven!!! If you leave your oven on and come back after four or six hours, is the wall around the stove even especially hot??? You can't even burn it down by leaving one of the burners on, unless there's some flammable material like a dish towel VERY close by.
Depending on your local gas rate, between $0.25-0.30 an hour; if electric, between $0.30 - 0.70 per hour.
Although there are places in the USA where gas is more expensive. I don't even have gas service in my neighborhood in suburban Maryland, and people in nearby neighborhoods who have it say it's more expensive here so they all have electric stoves and furnaces anyway.
We have an oil-burning furnace back home in California. Unfortunately we bought a couple of hundred gallons last summer when diesel fuel (basically the same stuff from the same refinery) was $3.50 a gallon, expecting it to go higher. Normally it's fairly economical compared to other energy sources. Most of the time we use wood-burning stoves with catalytic converters for heat, because we live in a rural county and firewood is only $200 a cord. But when you get up on a really cold morning you don't want to start a fire and then wait for two or three hours to get warm, you just want to push a button.
Actually, it is not that expensive. Bless the gods that your only problem is a bit higher bill instead of finding a new home. At least you probably learnt a lesson to check everything before going away for longer period...
That's always good advice, but you people really need to understand how your appliances work. You are NOT going to burn your house down by leaving the oven on! Not even if you could somehow jam it into self-cleaning mode!
LOL! I know. And I just bought my house 4 months ago. That would have majorly sucked had it burnt down.
As a one-time professional risk management consultant, the reason I nag people for being overly cautious and overstating a risk that is not actually dangerous... is that they may be distracting themselves from other risks that ARE dangerous.
How old is your water heater and when's the last time a plumber inspected it? Those things can flood your house and cause thousands of dollars in damage, even tens of thousands if you're away for a long time.
How old is your wiring? Have you got unshielded twisted-pair wiring in your ceiling, so if the support on a hanging lamp slowly gives way, it puts stress on the wire where it comes over the edge and could eventually work itself bare?
Are all the outlets in your kitchen, bathroom, laundry and outdoors ground-fault protected? Of course that kind of accident isn't so likely to burn your house down... it can just kill you.
