Do you have an electric water heater? After we sold our old farmhouse, the buyer complained about huge electric bills. We had not had such problems and suggested that maybe there was either electric leakage (but it was all overhead wiring and not likely) or something was staying on a lot more than it should.
What they later told us was that one of the water heater elements went bad somehow and it stayed on all the time. The water heater was old, at least 35 years old at the time, so they just replaced the whole thing. Their next power bill was about half of what the previous bill had been.
Our power bills are highest in the late Summer when we have air conditioning on and also pump a lot of water to keep the yard and garden green. If you have a well pump, you might check to see if it is cycling more often than it should be. You could have a pipe leaking somewhere, or maybe the check valve is allowing the water to leak back down into the well when the pump kicks off. BOTH of those problems have happened at my place, and they make the system use lots more electricity than it should.
As one of the posters suggested, the problem(s) must be on your side of the electric meter, since if there was a power leak somewhere on the other side of the meter, it would not show up in your power bill. It seems reasonable to me that if an underground wire was nicked, that power could leak to ground in damp soil. That is why I always run cables I plan to bury through conduit in my very rocky soil. But the cables I have buried have heavy insulation and are rated for direct burial and should be OK if they were buried carefully and have not been disturbed.
I believe that there are meters available to check if power continues to go through a circuit even though the load is turned off. Using such a meter to test buried lines would be a lot easier than digging them up, although I do not know if there is anything that could tell where the problem area is.
If you are not used to working on electrical systems, this might be a good time to discuss your problem with an electrician, and see if they can figure out what is wrong. Be careful, electricity can be very dangerous if you don"t know what you are doing. But I would first check the water heater. Good luck!
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Today's Featured Article - The Day Mom Drove the 8N - by Brian Browning. My Dad was wanting to put in a garden but couldn't operate the 8N and handle the old horse drawn plow he had found and rigged up to use with the tractor. Well, he decided to go get Mom out of the house and have her drive the tractor while he walked behind the plow. You got to understand that while my Mom is a hard worker who will always help whenever she can... she had never operated farm machinery before that day. Dad got her out there, explained how the clutch was the same as in our o
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