Price this house

What a house-profile lookup does

You type a street address and a zip. We send those to a partner with an ERCOT meter directory, get back the active meter at that premise, and retrieve a twelve-month usage profile for it. Then we run the same ranking we would for any other comparison: every plan filed on Power to Choose, priced month by month from its Electricity Facts Label, cheapest year first.

The profile is an estimate for that meter, not your Smart Meter Texas interval reads and not the last twelve bills. It is better than spreading a single average across a statewide summer-peaking curve, because the months belong to this premise. It is worse than typing twelve numbers from your bills or uploading a Smart Meter Texas export, because those are yours.

How this differs from a modeled estimate

The homepage calculator’s zip-and-average path takes one monthly kWh figure and stretches it across a Texas seasonal curve — roughly 1.6× in July and August against 0.7× in the mild months. Every house in every territory gets the same shape. A house-profile lookup replaces that statewide curve with twelve numbers attached to this meter. A north-facing bungalow and a west-facing two-story in the same zip no longer share a fictional August.

If we find the meter but cannot get a usage history, we fall back to that modeled seasonal estimate and say so. We do not invent a profile, and we do not pretend the fallback is unique to the house.

What we do not do

We do not store the street. It does not appear in the comparison URL — only the zip and twelve usage numbers do. Address-specific results are not indexed and are not in the sitemap; they render at the same /results route as any other comparison, which is noindex and disallowed in robots.txt. We do not write the street to the anonymous counter. The partner that looks the meter up necessarily sees the address; we do not keep a copy after the lookup returns. Privacy.

We do not pull interval data from Smart Meter Texas this way. If you have that file, the Meter data tab reads it in your browser and never uploads it. Assistants that want the same ranking should call compare_this_house on the MCP server rather than inventing a usage number.

If the meter is on a switch hold, we say so on the results before you try to enroll. A hold means the utility will reject a retailer change until it is cleared. If several units match the address, we ask you to pick one. If the address is outside the deregulated market, we say so rather than ranking plans you cannot buy.

How this ranks

Same formula as every other comparison on this site. The house profile changes the usage that goes into the formula. It does not change the order of operations, and it does not mix in reputation, commissions, or a star rating. How we count.