'creeping' gas meter

nic66

My Mum had a new gas meter installed a while ago. Recently she noticed that her bill seemed rather high as she hadn't really used any gas over the summer. She checked her readings and realised that the meter was going up even when no gas appliances were in use. When she queried this with British Gas she was told that it was due to the gas in the pipes and the only way to stop this was to physically turn off the gas supply at the meter box outside. Mum has worked out that she would have been paying £10 per month even when she wasn't using anything. Someone has suggested that it is called a 'creeping' meter and they are very common. Is this true? Surely it can't be right? Mum has now been turning the metre on/off every time she wants to use the oven! Has anyone any ideas?

S_t_e_v_e

I had the same problem with a gas meter. It was one with a digital display. Even when the tap was turned off it would still increase the reading.
I called the gas company and they asked me to take readings at the same time every day. When the readings weren't as expected they sent someone to change the meter and take the old one to an independent testing lab. After a couple of weeks the lab sent a copy of their report to me and the gas company. It said they had been unable to test the meter as the reading was increasing by itself before they had even connected up the pipes.
As the gas company could not tell when the meter started being faulty they wiped out all our charges and refunded us back to the date the faulty meter was installed. This was a few hundred pounds. We now have an old style dial type meter but at least it seems to work OK.
Get on the phone straight away and insist they do something.

Cardew

Bear in mind that if you have pilot lights they can use quite a lot of gas. There have been some post on this and the costs are surprisingly high.

matty2767

you can check if you have a leak by getting a corgi man out and he will conduct a standard test. it takes about 1/2 hour.

jesspolo

We moved into a rented 3 bedroom semi-detached house at the end of April. We changed our gas supplier to be the same as our Electricity supplier (Eon), which took place in late May/June. We gave them a reading at that point. Since then we have not had a bill, so we submitted a reading to them today online. It came back with an error message saying the amount was very different from what they would have estimated, and asked us to re-enter it.

The two readings (May and September) are either just 20kwh or 10,020 kwh apart. (It was 8481 kwh and now it's 8501kwh) We can't work out what it ought to be - while 20kwh doesn't seem like a lot (it went up 0.2 kwh when I had a shower this evening, so 20kwh is not enough), 10,020 kwh is way too high! We've not had the heating on over the summer months, so it's just hot water and very occasional use of a gas hob. There are only 2 of us in the house. To have used 10,020 kwh I would have had to have taken over 200 showers a day!

We will start to monitor the meter for a seven day period, but can anyone tell me what a reasonable expectation of our gas usage would be? I've been paying gas bills for years now, and I've never known a meter to 'roll over' and then surpass it's starting point again.:question:

megwatt

the formula for working out kwh goes as follows;

units x 1.022640
x 39
x 2.83
/3.6
= kwh

But if you have a newer five dial gas meter leave out the x 2.83

hope this helps !

Cardew

megwatt wrote: »

the formula for working out kwh goes as follows;

units x 1.022640
x 39
x 2.83
/3.6
= kwh

But if you have a newer five dial gas meter leave out the x 2.83

hope this helps !

"5 dial" will be a little confusing to many - 5 digit perhaps.

The above equation can be daunting for some people as well - especially as the calorific value figure can change.

If you have an old Imperial gas meter which measures in cubic feet, 1 unit(100 cubic feet) is approx 31kWh.

On the newer metric gas meter 1 gas unit(1 cubic metre) is approx 11kWh

jesspolo

I never knew that the meter units were not simply 1 kwh! That explains things a little.
I am not sure whether our meter is imperial or metric (we're renting and so don't know when this one went in). It's grey and yellow and has a disply which is 5 wheels which have the digits on the side, so provide a numbered display (not like the clock dials on the electricity meter).
A colleague has also suggested that as the house was empty for a year or so before we moved in then the estimate would be based on previous readings (i.e. 0 or almost 0 change), which would be significantly lower than ours are, obviously. I am not sure about this as we changed supplier (would they have the previous supplier's info from the asset id of the meter?)

Anyway, we'll wait and see what the bill comes for. It's either going to be very small, or VERY big!