How We Estimate Your Texas Electricity Usage
When you upload a bill, the analyzer estimates your 12-month usage in under a second — but that is a model output, not your real meter readings.
What we mean by "estimated" usage
The moment our parser reads the ESIID off your bill, we ask ComparePower's ERCOT-derived model for a usage estimate. The model takes your ESIID plus optional home attributes — square footage, year built — and returns 12 monthly kWh figures. The round trip takes about one second.
Those 12 numbers are shaped by typical seasonal patterns for similar Texas meters in the same service area. A 1,800 square foot home in Houston runs the AC hard from May through September and quiets down in February. A 900 square foot apartment in Dallas barely moves month to month. The model knows the shape; it does not know your habits.
That is enough to rank most plans correctly. It is not a substitute for your meter's actual readings, and the bill analyzer labels every chart and table built from this source as "Estimated."
How to get your real Smart Meter Texas readings
Smart Meter Texas, the official ERCOT-run service at smartmetertexas.com, holds the actual hourly readings from your meter. Eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours a year. Every spike, every dip, every overnight charge.
ElectricRates.org can request that data on your behalf with your consent. You give us your ESIID, meter number, and email; you check the consent box; we forward the request to Smart Meter Texas; Smart Meter Texas validates and sends the data back to us. Delivery is typically 1 to 2 hours — the meter has to confirm the request and ERCOT has to package the readings.
The recommendation gets sharper when the real data lands, especially for time-of-use plans, free-nights plans, and any household whose usage shape differs from typical. Until then the analyzer keeps working against the estimate so you are not stuck waiting.
Which estimate is good enough?
For most Texas households, the fast estimate is plenty. If your home is a typical size for your climate zone and your usage shape looks like everyone else's — heavier in summer, lighter in spring — the cheapest plan at your estimated annual usage is almost always the cheapest plan at your real annual usage.
Three cases earn the wait. Time-of-use plans price by hour and the estimate has no hourly resolution. Bill-credit plans turn on a single threshold, so a household sitting near 1,000 kWh some months and 900 in others can flip the ranking. And anyone about to lock a multi-year rate has every reason to want certainty before signing.
Privacy
The estimated usage from the ESIID profile lives only for the length of your session. Once you close the tab it is gone from our side.
Smart Meter Texas data, once delivered, is stored against your ESIID so we do not have to ask Smart Meter Texas a second time on a return visit. You can request deletion at any time. We do not sell either data set. No third-party comparison site receives it. The consent boundary is explicit: the model estimate requires no consent because no personal reading ever leaves your meter; the Smart Meter Texas pull requires consent because real readings do.
The Texas service area is large. See our Texas overview for utilities and providers.
Two ways to start
Both start in the bill analyzer. The estimate is instant; the Smart Meter Texas request runs in the background while you compare plans.