Economy 7: Is it worthwhile? Your views pls!

DragonQ wrote: »

So if your heating is gas, how do you use 20% of your electricity between 01:00-08:00 GMT? Do you just use so little that the fridge is a big chunk of total usage?

LOL, could be. I suspect much of the night usage is the Sky box, broadband router and assorted devices under my TV that are never switched off. I'm not really using that much additional electric in prime time anyway. Just the laptop (20 W) and TV (80 W) plus whatever is used for cooking. My exact split over the last 12 months is 2091 kWh day and 511 kWh night.

Cardew wrote: »

1. appliances on a timer in that period.

2. Electric showers before 8am(9am in summer)

3. Breakfast ditto.

I have an E7 meter although most of the time I have not been on an E7 tariff.

My family tend to get up early. One bathroom has an electric shower(we have gas CH) and we can put on dishwasher/dryer/washing machine in the early morning.

Even without trying to maximise off-peak usage we have averaged 22% over the past two years.

With that percentage there isn't much difference either way with many tariffs.

Ah, the electric shower is probably the biggest thing I'd forgotten about. I've never had one.

JSR wrote: »

LOL, could be. I suspect much of the night usage is the Sky box, broadband router and assorted devices under my TV that are never switched off. I'm not really using that much additional electric in prime time anyway. Just the laptop (20 W) and TV (80 W) plus whatever is used for cooking. My exact split over the last 12 months is 2091 kWh day and 511 kWh night.

Heh. My desktop PC uses ~175 W when doing sod all, my plasma TV uses ~150 W, plus ~50 W for my HTPC, ~30 W for my server and ~400 W for my A/V receiver. :eek:

amiehall wrote: »

My E7 clock doesn't change with BST but someone helpful has put a sticker on it at some point stating the hours during GMT and BST.

That is the point being made.

The clocks are not meant to change. So if the hours set for changeover from off-peak to peak consumption are, say, 1am to 8am during the winter(GMT) it becomes 2am to 9am in the summer(BST) i.e. the clock is an hour slow.

Cardew wrote: »

Agree with the thrust of your post, but the situation today(as described above) might not apply tomorrow.

There is also merit in those with older(thus less efficient) oil/LPG boilers to consider switching them off during the summer and heating water by an immersion heater on E7.

Indeed even an old gas boiler with a 'flamethrower' pilot light might find E7 cheaper.

My issue, and I have one, is with that 40% no storage figure. I don't recall till the very recent past any figure even close to 10%. We know, and there are many such proactive posters right here in this group, who make an E7 ToS tariff pay without any stored water or space heat. We also know why and how households end up with an inappropriate ToS service / meter. If however it took 30 years to reach from 0-20%, my question is why has it taken only a couple of years to reach 40% ? The rise of hundreds of web sites proclaiming to sell E7 replacement products that are neither PartL nor E7 would explain this sudden and unexplained phenomena, even with interventions from the ASA enforcing the CAP code this practice persists.

Break even point British Gas 45% - Scottish Power - 15%

It always amazes me that BG whose break even tariff split is 30% higher for example than Scottish Power, has any E7 / E10 consumers at all. In the final analysis [smart meters not yet a runner] switching is the key to effective engagement and market market competition, and a common standing charge would be a big single hammer to knock a hole through pricing camouflage and bring a transparency of price tariff comparisons. Either a compulsory fixed national standing charge & unit rates, or a compulsory no-standing charge & unit rates, and a compulsory prohibition on any discounts other than DD / e-Account rules would be a solid starting point for ToS customers.

lstar337 wrote: »

Glad to see I'm not the only person creating spreadsheets/graphs to monitor my usage!

I have spreadsheet values with meter readings every month for a few reasons:

- To find out what the monthly and yearly usage is (roughly) to find the cheapest supplier.
- Evidence of usage should suppliers get anything wrong.
- Evidence of usage for housemates.
- To see how much gas usage is heating and how much is not (always easier to reduce bills if you know where the money's going).

Right now my "higher rate" electricity cost easily covers everything we need regardless (oven, kettle, microwave, electric showers, washing machine), so adding anything extra (like my home server which is on all the time) only uses the "lower rate" of 10.1p/kWh (inc VAT), which is cheap these days. I dread the day my fixed tariff ends.

Right now we're using 10 kWh per day on average, so £1.24 per day.