Cutting a MORE Power Bill in Iloilo: The Decisions in the Order They Arrive

Most of what saves electricity in Iloilo City is the same thing that saves it anywhere: run the aircon fewer hours. The Iloilo electricity guide prices that decision against all seven published 2026 cycles and there is no point restating it here.

What that page does not cover is the two levers on either side of it, and both are peculiar to how MORE Power actually bills. One arrives before the meter is energised, in a document nobody reads. The other arrives every month, because the rate is repriced every month and the same saving is worth a different amount each time.

This page takes them in the order they reach you.

Before the Meter: The Form That Sets Your Deposit

The first controllable electricity cost in Iloilo City happens before any electricity is used.

A new residential connection carries a bill deposit, and the ERC Magna Carta for Residential Electricity Consumers computes it as one month of estimated billing “based on the load schedule submitted by the consumer”. That load schedule is a form you fill in at application, listing the appliances you intend to run and their wattage. Overstate it and you fund a larger deposit than your actual consumption warrants.

Two cautions, because this is less settled than it sounds. MORE Power own service contract publishes a different basis entirely, a table keyed to the size of the service entrance wire, running from PHP 2,500 at a low-load residential connection to PHP 8,000 at No. 2 AWG and above. And MORE Power described a third basis to the Daily Guardian in July 2026, a 12-month consumption average. Three published bases for one figure, and no source reconciles them. Ask which one the counter is applying.

The deposit is not a fee. It is refundable within one month of terminating service provided all bills are paid, and it is re-evaluated annually against your actual consumption, so an honest declaration corrects itself either way. What an inflated one costs you is the use of the money in the meantime, and the hidden costs guide works through where the rest of a lease’s cash goes.

Every Month: The Rate You Are Multiplying By

MORE Power reprices monthly, and 2026 has been volatile enough that the timing of a saving matters as much as its size.

The spread between the February floor and the July high is 23.70 percent. The single largest step was May to June, 17.18 percent inside one cycle.

That has a consequence worth making explicit. A saving is not a fixed peso amount. It is a quantity of kilowatt-hours multiplied by whatever the utility is charging this month, so the same fan-instead-of-aircon habit was worth PHP 275 more in July than in February on a 100 kWh difference. A saving installed once appreciates while the rate climbs, and the rate has risen in five of the seven month-on-month moves this year.

The practical version is short. Install the change in a cheap cycle if you have the choice, because you will be collecting on it in the expensive ones. Do not wait for a high bill to act, because by then you have already paid for the month that prompted you.

The One That Dwarfs the Rest

Aircon hours. The Iloilo electricity guide prices a 1.5HP unit at eight hours a day across the whole 2026 series and puts the inverter-against-non-inverter difference at PHP 1,387 to PHP 1,734 a month, on declared draw assumptions it states rather than hides. Hours beat temperature by a wide margin, and the timer is the control that matters.

Two things worth adding rather than repeating.

The lifeline discount will not reach you. MORE Power’s lifeline brackets stop at 95 kilowatt-hours a month and require 4Ps or PSA documentation, and condominium units are excluded. A foreigner in Mandurriao business-park stock running any air conditioning at all is several times over the ceiling before the exclusions are reached. It is worth knowing so you do not spend an afternoon at the counter on it.

Iloilo City is flat, and that changes which free levers exist. The Cebu equivalent of this page leans on cross-ventilation, which works there because a large part of its expat stock sits on the Lahug, Busay and Talamban hillsides where an evening breeze is reliable. Mandurriao, Molo, La Paz and Jaro are not that. Whether a given Iloilo unit ventilates is a property of the floor plan and the tower’s orientation rather than of the city, so test it in the unit before you sign rather than budgeting for it. The neighbourhood guide covers what the districts do and do not have.

What This Page Will Not Tell You

There is a family of percentages that circulates on every Philippine electricity-saving page: a figure for what each degree on the thermostat costs, one for a dirty filter, one for shading the outdoor unit, one for an inverter refrigerator, one for what share of a bill aircon represents, one for the dry-season lift.

None of them appears here, for the same reason none of them appears on the Cebu version. Every page carrying them either states them without attribution or attributes them to a source that returns HTTP 403 to us, so we cannot read the underlying measurement, and a search-engine summary of a number is not a citation for it. Publishing a percentage we cannot open would make this page more quotable and less true.

What survives that test is arithmetic on figures we can check: the ledger rates above, the declared draw bands in the electricity guide, and the multiplication between them. It is less satisfying and it is defensible, which is the trade this site makes everywhere.

The cross-city version of the same discipline is on the Cebu page, which reaches the same conclusion against a different utility, and the cost breakdown shows why the gap between the two cities on this line is too small to act on.

The Order to Do This In

1. At application, declare the load you will actually run. It sets the deposit, it is re-evaluated annually against your consumption anyway, and an inflated figure only costs you the use of the money.
2. Check whether you have a MORE Power account at all. A sub-metered unit has none of these levers, and the markup is invisible until you ask for the master meter bill.
3. Put the aircon on a timer in the first week. It is the whole game, and it is worth more each cycle the rate rises.
4. Do not wait for a shocking bill. The cycle that shocks you is already paid; the saving starts with the next reading.
5. Read the rate, not the total. MORE Power publishes each cycle at morepower.com.ph and the series is downloadable as the Iloilo electricity rate dataset, collected on the basis set out in our methodology. A bill that rose while your usage fell is a repricing, not a leak.