Recently my wife bought a kiln for her jewelry/glass business. It is pretty hefty and required a few thousand $$ just to upgrade our electrical service (yes, I did throw in a couple of 220V boxes on "my" side of the garage). Anyway we've received two electric bills since the kiln has been up and running and they have been huge! (anything over $70 is huge here in coastal Orange County, and these two have been $120-$190) This last one showed almost a doubling in electricity usage compared to the last two years. In the past (last year) we wrote off as business expense a percentage of our utilitites based on the percentage of our home's square footage that is used for the business. That seems fair enough when you concider lights, small tools and the computer. But based on the huge load this one tool uses I'm wondering if there is a way to track its electricity usage for tax purposes. I need to call our accoutant, but I thought I would throw this out for discussion here as well.
(BTW, we have the power requirements/specs and we could keep track of the pre-programed timing, but I'm sure the heating coils go on and off during the heating cycles, so I don't know how accurate it would be to simply multiply these two numbers to get kWhrs.)
Thanks,