1800 ft two-story brick (real brick, not fascia) with another 900 sq feet in the basement, which is half finished. 2700 in all. Built in 1968.
Plus a garage that's attached that barely fits a small car, and the unheated detached two-car garage/shop out back.
The attached garage wall backs up to the kitchen cabinets and there's zero insulation there, so if the garage is hot it adds to the main floor's heat load. It's outside walls and attic are insulated, but parking a hot car in there without leaving the garage door open a little while is bad in summer. (It's not as tall as the rest of the house and has it's own roof.)
Brick painted white with white vinyl siding and a minimal layer of insulation underneath that on the upper half. Pretty close to black roof tiles. Helps keep snow from hanging around up there in winter. Good contrast against the bright Red fake shutters on the windows on the front. Or so my wife says.
Highest we've ever seen is $225 for gas/electric combined. Maybe $250 once in ten years. That was a particularly brutal month-long cold snap.
Forced air central natural gas heating. Big overdone 80% efficient Carrier furnace that probably will never die. Heats the whole place up completely on the coldest days in about ten minutes flat. In fact IMHO it short cycles, and I need to find a thermostat with a three to four degree hysteresis to keep it from going on and off so much. Our digital Honeywell only gives one degree hysteresis so it's on/off/on/off all the time. Most of the time it's in non-heat, cool-down mode. Three degree temperature swings would be fine.
Being a computer guy, there's also far too many electronic things on all the time including some high power RF links for the radio club that operate from the basement.
Average year round costs, after replacing the old drafty aluminum windows is $140/month. Prior to that it was about $165. Glad we had a friend make us a good bid on that project, we won't see any return on that investment before it's time to replace them again.
Break even, but not having condensation on aluminum frames and drafts in winter even with storm windows on is much nicer, of course.
No AC, we open the windows at night and run some fans. Put one in the attic hole as an updraft fan. In fact you guys just jinxed it. The $15 box fan motor just died. LOL.
Should really install a whole house fan, but haven't wanted to tackle cutting larger gable vents and dealing with resizing the vinyl siding outside. Too hard to get to the gables without scaffolding on the roof of the garage.
Could also do evaporative cooling here on the super cheap since we're so dry, but maintenance on those standing on a fairly good pitched two-story roof isn't all that fun since Spring and Fall is when we get lots of wind. Also not a fan of the typical square box on the roof. Looks tacky.
Saw some long skinny ones once that looked better and had better build than most, and were also designed to be distributed via standard air vents in the second story room ceilings, ran off of a thermostat and an outdoor humidity sensor, but didn't pursue it. It was pretty high-end, at four times as expensive as the big ugly boxes, and that didn't include the vents or duct work needed.
May still do that type one if these days if I can find one that's not outrageously priced. Water cooling works pretty well here in the high desert plains.
We have a small AC unit for the bedroom during the hottest part of summer (now) which will get rolled back into a closet and put away by end of August or so once daytime temps fall below 90 and stay there. Have a bigger window unit we inherited but getting it up into a second story window isn't easy.
Good insulation in the walls and attic but the old blown in fluff stuff could use a layer of the pink stuff without vapor block rolled down on top of it up in the attic. It just fills the space between the joists and if you dig a bit with a foot, you can walk on them up there.
No cathedral ceilings, closets only big enough to hold a tiny wardrobe (wife converted one of the bedrooms to a dressing room since she has racks of barbershop quartet and chorus costumes) but well built and well insulated with brick painted white.
Rare to see the living room get above 85F on the hottest days of over 100F outside. If we get it opened up the second the OAT drops below the internal temp in the evening and button it up before that reverses in the morning, the worst is 80F by late afternoon.
In the winter we make use of a standard timer thermostat with 65F when we're away and 68 or 70F or higher if we feel like it, from 5PM to midnight. It takes until about 4 AM to drop from 72 to 65 on all but the below zero nights. Then it plateaus in my testing and tends to hold there for a while. The furnace rarely cycles at all when set to 65F in the daytime in winter.
There's a reason I call the newer houses with cardboard walls, "shoebox quality". Brick walls rock.
Oh. Ceiling fans everywhere just to move the air around a bit too.
