What I mean by doing your homework when buying natural gas is that you must go online and look around for the best rates. Here in Ohio I had to do it when we moved into an area where gas was the option you needed to look at in order to get your power. Unlike electricity, gas is generally deregulated here. That means rates can fluctuate rapidly. The delivery cost is regulated, however, so you generally don’t have to worry about that. But if you’re buying gas in sufficient quantities, make sure you know the rate before signing on the dotted line.
Coming from a state where all you needed to do was sign up with the electric company for a plan and then pay the bill at the rate the state set, getting gas proved a challenge. My first step was to go online and look for a site that would tell me everything I needed to know about natural gas. I found a great site that had links to rates by region and city, surely a great option that saved us countless hours of asking around or looking online for sources that might or might not be up to date. That’s important as well as you don’t want to sign up for a rate you thought you were getting only to discover the price skyrocketed in the interim.
After doing my homework and looking at my options, I dove in and signed up for what I thought would work for my household. I have to say that using gas seems like a really good idea. I think it’s definitely cleaner than what they do to generate electricity (mostly coal plants unless you’ve got access to nuclear energy) and it seems cheaper to me considering the state I lived in before moving here.