Another "high winter quarterly bill" advice thread...

Mr_Joe

Just got the bill today, and it has come as a shock. We're students living in a rented 3 bed 'flat', basicly the bottom 2 floors of a terrace house converted. Moved in July, was with Npower, then switched to southern for a month, then switched back, so this is the first bill since switching back.

November 14th- 21st January electricity was £116
30th October-28th January Gas was £228.46

I knew it was going to be a lot but woah. We don't have a thermostat system, so there was a time when someone would just stick the gas heating on til someone remembered to turn it off. So i worked out how to program a timer and set it to come on half hour bursts throughout the day, obviously in hindsight this was too much and i've since changed it. The boiler broke one day so for about 5 days we all had to rely on electric heaters, mine was an oil one set to the lowest setting but the other guys had a Fan one and one of those glowing orange things, so i'm not suprised by the high electricity usage.

Strange thing is though over christmas the house was empty for a week, everything switched off, one of the guys was gone for 2 weeks, another one for like 5. Then i went on holiday for 2 weeks in january. So i thought this would havehad an impact.

Anyway the statement says it was worked out with actual readings so there's nothing we can do about it. Im not sure if this means our Gas boiler is really ineffecient? When an engineer came to fix the boiler he told us to keep the temperature dial on the highest setting for Heat and Water. is this the correct thing to do? also is it best to have all the radiators on the highest of 1-5. In my mind i always figured that so long as the boiler is "on" it's burning gas so it's worth having everything set to the highest for the shorter amount of time. the boiler is a ferroli f24b. If less radiators are turned on will the remaining ones get hot faster?

Our payment plan is N power monthly with a paypoint card, reason being the other guys are useless for paying their shair of the bills on the correct day so i did'nt want the money coming out of my account. The statement says "your account balance is £284.66(for information only)" but doesn't actualy say "please pay this amount". Does this mean it's assume that if we keep paying the reccomended monthly amount of £83 that it'll gradually even out as gas usage will go down. As i thought the idea of this month payment scheme was to pay more then needed in the summer months so that winter wouldn't be a kick in the !!!.

thanks for any advice! ohhh how much easier it was last year renting a house with bills included with the rent! haha

Magentasue

I think it means you've had your heating on a lot rather than your boiler isn't that good.

The more heat you have, the more gas is used. Turning some radiators down means less gas will be used to maintain temp. Fewer radiators on uses less gas.

Don't know about paypoint cards, but usually monthly plans mean you pay the same every month. The monthly amount is usually adjusted if the bills are higher than predicted, rather than demanding the balance.