📨 Have you signed up to the Forum's new Email Digest yet? Get a selection of trending threads sent straight to your inbox daily, weekly or monthly!

Electricity charges - I think we're being ripped off...

Options
13567

Comments

  • espresso
    espresso Posts: 16,448 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    Have you got say an electric fire of known wattage? It would be quite easy to test the meter for yourself e.g. a 3kW fire on for 20 minutes should consume 1 unit.
    :doh: Blue text on this forum usually signifies hyperlinks, so click on them!..:wall:
  • Unfortunately I don't; and I was trying to avoid the extra hassle and expense of buying one specifically for this purpose. Unfortunately it looks like it will ultimately be necessary...
  • espresso
    espresso Posts: 16,448 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    prolific8 wrote: »
    Unfortunately I don't; and I was trying to avoid the extra hassle and expense of buying one specifically for this purpose. Unfortunately it looks like it will ultimately be necessary...

    Well if your hot water tank is cold and your immersion heater is rated at 3kW, it's thermostat is not likely to cut in while doing a 20 minute meter test.
    :doh: Blue text on this forum usually signifies hyperlinks, so click on them!..:wall:
  • PrinceGaz
    PrinceGaz Posts: 139 Forumite
    prolific8 wrote: »
    Hi Gaz,

    A lot of people have mentioned the immersion heater to me as being the potential source of the problem. The issue here is that pretty much since we've moved in I've had the immersion heater turned off at the fusebox - unless it's somehow running regardless of the fusebox I don't think it can be that.

    You'll want to slap me for asking this obvious question, but if you turn your hot tap on and let it run for several minutes, when you believe you have turned the immersion heater totally off, is the water still cold (or about room temperature where the tank is) or is it hot :p I'm sorry but it had to be asked.
    and then I'm going to do similar on Monday except I'm going to leave it how I normally do, ie with computers/Sky box/router...

    Oooooh, you may have given the game away there. "except I'm going to leave it how I normally do, ie with computers/Sky box/router...". Computers? As in more than one? An average desktop PC will consume 100-150W even when idling, and if you have more than one running, I think you might have what are more high-performance PCs which regardless of their ages may be using more like 150-250W each. If they're not totally idling, high-performance computers can easily approach 300W (and extreme high-end gaming systems can even use over 800W each, but you'd already know about that if you were into that sort of thing because of the PSU you'd have had to buy for it). Then throw in all the odds and sods you probably have left on in your computer and AV setup and we could easily be approaching 1KW total when you're not at home. An average usage of 1.6KW all day given that single sentence you posted, now seems a lot more likely.

    If you want to cut your power-bill down, it might be wise to turn stuff off every day when not at home, maybe leave one computer running for file-sharing if you're into that kinda thing, but otherwise shut down all non-essential systems. The days like when I ran SETI@Home 24x7 on my PCs is long gone. Instead of burning what was quite cheap electricity day and night to not find aliens, I now turn off everything I won't be using if I'm away for more than about an hour or two. And I certainly will never run a distributed-computing project that fully loads my CPU or GPU like SETI@Home even when my PC is running ever again, unless energy prices drop dramatically. Which is a shame as my GeForce 8800GTS card is a very powerful number-cruncher compared with what most people have, and at least one of those projects could utilise it and run around ten times faster on it than on modern CPUs, but it also eats electricity like mad when fully utilised, such that my PC uses nearly 350W measured at the wall (compared with around 190W when surfing the net and posting comments on forums like this).
  • Hi Gaz,

    The water is always cold, consistent with the water heater being switched off. I don't mean to sound sceptical, but even with a couple of computers running (a situation I had in my old place where the bills weren't this high), I don't see how we can be running up bills that even a four bedroom house occupied during the day would baulk at. My experiment the other day with just the fridge and freezer left on with everything else switched off yielded a usage of 3kwh between 8.20am and 6.20pm. Unreasonable or not?

    I'm borrowing a fan heater tomorrow and testing it at lunchtime with everything else turned off. With any luck this should confirm once and for all if the meter is the problem.
  • Magentasue
    Magentasue Posts: 4,229 Forumite
    prolific8 wrote: »
    Hi Gaz,
    My experiment the other day with just the fridge and freezer left on with everything else switched off yielded a usage of 3kwh between 8.20am and 6.20pm. Unreasonable or not?

    We have a large fridge and similar sized freezer. They use a couple of kwh a day between them. They are normally full and both A rated.
  • espresso wrote: »
    ................


    Sorry, a little confused. Are you saying this is too high for just a fridge/freezer?
  • espresso
    espresso Posts: 16,448 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    prolific8 wrote: »
    Sorry, a little confused. Are you saying this is too high for just a fridge/freezer?

    Yes..............
    :doh: Blue text on this forum usually signifies hyperlinks, so click on them!..:wall:
  • Magentasue
    Magentasue Posts: 4,229 Forumite
    prolific8 wrote: »
    Sorry, a little confused. Are you saying this is too high for just a fridge/freezer?

    I think so!

    I'm not sure how long you have to time a fridge or freezer over, since they don't use a consistant amount of power over a short time. We left ours plugged into a monitor for a week and divided by seven to get a daily figure. On a good day, (no washing machine, drier, dishwasher) six of us watching TV, using laptops, bit of vacuuming, radios etc, we use 8kwh. Espresso calculated you use almost that for your fridge and freezer. Are they quite elderly?
  • Magentasue wrote: »
    I think so!

    I'm not sure how long you have to time a fridge or freezer over, since they don't use a consistant amount of power over a short time. We left ours plugged into a monitor for a week and divided by seven to get a daily figure. On a good day, (no washing machine, drier, dishwasher) six of us watching TV, using laptops, bit of vacuuming, radios etc, we use 8kwh. Espresso calculated you use almost that for your fridge and freezer. Are they quite elderly?

    All the appliances are fairly old (particularly the oven). I just checked this morning, and having had the oven, a few lights, a couple of TV's and computers on, we've used 20kwh in around 15 hours. I've got a 2kw fan heater here that I'm going to test at lunchtime with nothing else switched on.
This discussion has been closed.
Meet your Ambassadors

🚀 Getting Started

Hi new member!

Our Getting Started Guide will help you get the most out of the Forum

Categories

  • All Categories
  • 351.2K Banking & Borrowing
  • 253.2K Reduce Debt & Boost Income
  • 453.7K Spending & Discounts
  • 244.2K Work, Benefits & Business
  • 599.3K Mortgages, Homes & Bills
  • 177K Life & Family
  • 257.6K Travel & Transport
  • 1.5M Hobbies & Leisure
  • 16.2K Discuss & Feedback
  • 37.6K Read-Only Boards

Is this how you want to be seen?

We see you are using a default avatar. It takes only a few seconds to pick a picture.