A daft question from me

narabanekeater

Please dont laugh but im really getting the hang of this money saving and want to watch our gas meter so I can guess roughly how much our bills should be.
Our meter has a showing of 4 numbers plus a number on the end in red.
If for example our current reading is 1234 and the number in read being 1 does this end number one need to go to 9 before a whole unit is used and then the reading will be 1235. So that end red number going from 1-9 costs us roughly 15p (the rough cost one one gas unit) Or is it a change of one unit every time that read end number goes from 1 to 2 to 3
Hope im making sence but its got me stumpped.

Fran

The units are the 1234 and the extra number is parts of a unit. When they ask you for a reading you would ignore the red number.

squeaky

The red number is usually a tenth of a unit.

edit: Crossed, sorry

Mr_Proctalgia

Squeaky

IIRC Your Gas meter reads in 100's of cubic feet that is why you get all those weird conversion factors on your bill, the red number or anything after the decimal point is ignored. As far as I can remember you get about 31.5Kw out of 100 cubic foot. I don't think any of the providers still used therms anymore (100,000 btu)

njm_2

Not sure that 1 unit equals 100 cubic foot, but for each whole unit on the dial you need to apply the following equation to calculate the kWH’s.
(To convert gas units to kilowatt hours: gas units used x imperial to metric conversion factor (2.83) x volume conversion factor (1.022640) x calorific value (39.7) divided by kilowatt hour conversion factor (3.6) = kilowatt hours used.) This is the same as: gas units used x 31.3 = kilowatt hours used.
The figure for your Calorific Value may be different from the example above, mine is 39.5033, but it can be found on your gas bill.

Do make sure that you have an imperial (ft3) meter rather than a metric (m3) – if you have the latter then you don’t use the 2.83 multiplier (imperial to metric conversion factor) and would give a combined conversion figure of:
gas units used x 11.3 = kilowatt hours used.