https://www.getquoll.com/, http://quollhomes.com/

Quoll, New York, NY (2026)

10/26/2026

The mortgage payment is one line on the actual cost of owning a home. Property taxes, insurance, utilities and HOA fees add to it.

Our guide, Home Buying Cost Breakdown: Every Number Beyond the Sticker Price, lists what else to budget for, which costs are rising fastest, and how to get the numbers for a specific home instead of a national average.

Find the guide under resources on QuollHomes

10/23/2026

Listings show the price, the taxes and the square footage. The utility bills are harder to see. They can look very different from the bills at the home you live in now, and local and regional climate risks can make them spike in certain seasons. Before you make an offer, here is a checklist for understanding a home's utility bills, in the order you can find things out.

1. Check the home's climate risk, and how it compares with the county and the state. Cold waves, heat waves and storms shape how hard a home's heating and cooling have to work. QuollHomes shows climate risks for a home, including at the county level, and how they compare with the rest of the state and the nation.

2. Look up the cost of electricity. Rates vary widely from place to place, so a bill that looked normal in your last home may not carry over. The Bills & Affordability tab on QuollHomes.com shows electricity costs.

3. Ask what heats and cools the home. Natural gas, oil, propane, electric baseboard, a heat pump, central air and window units all come with different bills, and each tells you which utilities to ask about next.

4. Ask for the highest bills. A seller may not want to hand over copies, but may share the peak amounts: the highest bill in summer and the highest in winter. Ask for each utility the home has, including water.

10/21/2026

We're all seeing 2026-2027 winter outlooks popping up across the spectrum, from the Farmers' Almanac to NOAA. Before you make an offer, it's important to check each home's climate risks to see what extreme might mean for you and your bills. QuollHomes shows risks such as cold waves and ice storms, and how they compare with the rest of the state and the nation.

NOAA is predicting a warmer than usual winter for many parts of the country. A forecast like that describes the average. It doesn't show how extreme the worst few days can get.

Winter 2022-23 is a good example. Massachusetts had its warmest winter on record, and many places across the Southeast ran 4 to 6 degrees above normal, with Alabama among the warmest. Then Winter Storm Elliott swept across the eastern half of the country in the days around Christmas. In much of the Southeast, daily temperatures ran 20 to 35 degrees below average. Nationally, natural gas use in homes and businesses averaged 55% above normal from December 21 to 26, and on December 23 the Lower 48 set a record for daily gas demand.

When a home uses more energy, the bill goes up, and extreme days are when a home uses the most. A mild winter overall doesn't prevent them.

10/19/2026

As we're heading towards winter, we're hearing questions about utility costs, one in particular:

"If heating oil costs so much, why wouldn't I just heat everything with electricity?"

Because at Massachusetts electricity rates, electric baseboard heat costs more. Fuels are sold in different units, so the fair comparison is what the same amount of heat costs on each one. Take a winter month of heat for a typical home that heats with oil, about 80 gallons of oil. At current Massachusetts prices, that same heat costs about $269 with natural gas, $498 with heating oil, and $958 with electric baseboard, nearly double oil.

Heat pumps, which use electricity far more efficiently, change that math. But a home's system often reflects the fuel that made sense when it was installed, and each fuel's price has moved on its own since.

Alabama shows the other side. If a home in Alabama needed that much heat in the winter, it would cost about $495 with electric baseboard, roughly what oil costs in Massachusetts. That's because the electricity rate is about 15 cents there, versus about 29 cents in Massachusetts. In EIA's 2020 survey, 64% of Alabama homes used electricity as their main heating fuel, compared with 17% in Massachusetts.

Beyond the winter climate outlook, this winter is also not a normal year for oil. EIA projects heating oil prices will average 34% above last winter's nationally and attributes the rise to higher global distillate prices. Regardless of cause, homes that heat with oil, mostly in the Northeast, are likely to see a jump in heating costs.

One tip for any home: use less energy for everything that isn't heat, from lighting to appliances, so the total bill is smaller whichever fuel heats the house.

10/14/2026

Moving somewhere cold? Before you make an offer, look up the home's risks, such as cold waves and ice storms, on QuollHomes.com and see how they compare with the rest of the state and the nation. Then, confirm how the home is heated, because climate decides which bills a home comes with.

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Here is what that can look like. Picture yourself moving from Alabama to Massachusetts. Your power bill looks familiar: the state averages are about $174 a month in Alabama and about $167 in Massachusetts.

Then winter arrives in Massachusetts, and suddenly you're needing about 2.6 times the heating you did back home in Alabama. After a few cold spells, your oil tank runs low, so you schedule a delivery. Once the tank is refilled, the driver hands you a bill you've never had before, on top of your power bill.

About 1 in 5 Massachusetts homes use heating oil as their main source of heat, so a newcomer can easily buy one of those homes without realizing it. Nationally, EIA projects that homes running on oil will spend about $2,115 this winter, from November through March. That is roughly $423 a month on top of the power bill, or close to $590 a month in all.

Sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration (2024 residential electricity averages; Winter Fuels Outlook 2026-27). NOAA Climate Prediction Center (population-weighted heating degree days, July 2025 to June 2026). U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 American Community Survey.

10/08/2026

EIA released its winter energy outlook this week, and it's a mixed picture. Nationally, homes heating with natural gas are expected to spend about 9% less than last winter, and propane homes about 3% less. Electric-heat homes should see bills rise about 4%, and heating oil homes should spend about 21% more.

EIA also notes that weather is a significant source of uncertainty in its forecast. It points out that NOAA has identified a strong El Niño pattern this winter, and El Niño's effects are not the same everywhere.

Bills that look alike can be built from very different pieces. In EIA's more recent data, the average household electric bill was about $167 a month in Massachusetts and about $174 in Alabama. Massachusetts households used about 570 kWh at a rate of roughly 29 cents. Alabama households used about 1,143 kWh at a rate of roughly 15 cents.

In Massachusetts, the rate is nearly double Alabama's even though the electricity bill is only slightly lower, and homes that heat with gas, oil, or propane pay for that fuel separately from the power bill.

In Alabama, how much power a home uses depends on weather, the home's size, and how efficient it is.

If you're moving to a different climate, your sense of a normal bill comes from where you lived before, and it may not carry over. Be sure to check the climate risks of each home you're considering buying before you make the offer.

10/05/2026

Energy-efficient upgrades, a new HVAC system, better insulation, high-efficiency windows, can lower utility costs. The upfront price is usually what stops people from starting.

Check out our guide, Funding Energy-Efficient Home Improvements, to see how homeowners pay for upgrades that make a longer-term difference: HELOCs or equity loans for bigger projects, personal loans for smaller ones, and state or utility rebates that can be combined with either. Pairing a rebate with a loan can bring the upfront cost down to a fraction of the sticker price.

Read it here: quollhomes.com/resources/guides/funding-energy-efficient-home-improvements

10/02/2026

Climate risk doesn't stop at a home's front door. Utilities carry that exposure too, often spread across large service areas with a more diverse mix of hazards than any single home will ever face. Wildfire is one example: when the spark traces back to a utility's infrastructure, equipment that should have been maintained, replaced, or shut off in time, the liability that follows gets built into rates for every customer that utility serves, not just the community where the fire started.

California's three major utilities show how differently this plays out: cost and rate don't move together, the utility paying the most to cover wildfire risk isn't always the one charging the most per kilowatt-hour.

This isn't limited to California. On Maui, the August 2023 Lahaina fire was traced to Hurricane Dora's wind, passing hundreds of miles offshore, combined with severe drought and dry invasive grass; a downed power line is a suspected but never officially confirmed spark. Hawaiian Electric's share of the resulting settlement: $1.99 billion of a $4 billion total, with payments beginning no earlier than mid-2025.

Wildfire is one of many hazards that can shape both a utility's costs and the power bill in your future home. Check the home. Check the county. Check the state. Quoll Homes shows climate risk at all three levels together, so you see the full picture.

09/30/2026

A utility bill can carry two different kinds of climate-driven charge: one that retires once it's paid off, and one that's permanent by design, built into the rate base with no scheduled end date. Both can appear on the same bill at once.

For example, California's Wildfire Fund charge is the second kind: created after the utility bankruptcies and catastrophic wildfire losses of the late 2010s, it's been on every PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric bill since October 2019, $5.91 per megawatt-hour in 2026, about $909 million a year statewide, with no scheduled end date. Other wildfire-related riders on those same bills are the first kind: PG&E's 2020 and 2021 Wildfire Mitigation Cost riders finished amortizing in early 2025 and March 2026, part of why PG&E's residential rate actually fell, from about 38.6 cents/kWh to 33.7 cents over that stretch. The fund charge is the one piece that didn't roll off with them.

In Colorado, Xcel Energy took a different approach: raising $1.9 billion between 2025 and 2027 to harden its grid against wildfire ahead of a disaster. The bet is that resilience spent now costs less than a disaster paid off later.

Homes where utility infrastructure carries higher climate risks, including wind and wildfire exposure, are more likely to be paying for one of these approaches already, or heading toward needing one. A home's climate risk score is a clue, but it doesn't capture the risk sitting on the poles and lines miles away. Understanding how the local utility is handling risks, combined with the risks around the home, is how a buyer finds out how exposed their bill will be.

09/28/2026

A "normal" utility bill doesn't tell a buyer whether that number is stable or already climbing.

When a climate-driven event, a storm, a wildfire season, a grid-hardening push, forces a utility into extraordinary costs, those costs are rarely billed all at once. They're financed, spread across a rider on the bill for years, the way a loan payment is spread across a term. For as long as that rider is active, the "normal" bill sits higher than it otherwise would, with nothing on the bill itself explaining why.

A single bill, checked once, can't tell a buyer whether a home is partway through paying one of these riders down, or about to start a new one. Areas carrying higher climate risk tend to see this cycle repeat, one rider retiring only for the next one to begin.

This is where modeling a what-if matters: running a home's climate risk against a range of future cost scenarios shows how much room a budget actually needs to absorb a multi-year cost swing.

Using a listing platform like Quoll Homes, which shows a property's climate risk and helps buyers model the costs of a future spike against their own budget, is how you find out ahead of time whether you could absorb one without it becoming a reason to sell.

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