Huge electricity consumption, can't work out why!

ratkid132

So I decided to ditch and switch gas and electric on behalf of my mum as it's been at least a year since I last did. Last time I switched us to paperless billing to save money but of course I should have realised she wasn't going to actually READ the damn emails >.>

So when I started looking through them to work out energy usage for the comparison sites I was startled to find how high my energy usage was, it's just us 2 living in this 3 bedroom house... and in a year we used 5292kWh!

But that's not toooo ridiculous, I mean it's high but then I confess being a geek we have computers and TVs all around the house and I only have myself to blame for that one. No what concerns me is in the energy consumption breakdown between January and March (Jan 1st - March 31st) we used 2800kWh alone! I mean that's over half our usage in 1/4 of the year... and 1800kWh higher than adjacent bars as you can see:

(Oh turns out I can't post links because I'm new but I do have a bar graph that should go here :P)

The trouble is for the life of me I can't work out what has caused it? We have gas powered heating and hot water, and a gas oven / grill etc. So nothing heating that uses electricity apart from a 2kW oil fire in the lounge, and that's not on 24/7 anyway.

Anyone care to assist in working out what this is? I've phoned British Gas (my supplier) who have sent out an energy saving pack with a plug in power monitor included but that won't arrive for a while.

The only things I can think of that could use electricity in winter and not summer are the pump for the hot water which claims to be ~100Watt at most and that oil heater I mentioned earlier... anyone got an idea?

Thanks very much!

Matt

Cardew

Welcome to the forum

I assume you have ruled out estimated meter readings?

The normal cause is that your January meter reading(and possibly earlier meter readings) were under-estimated* and your March bill is a 'catch-up' bill.

*Or incorrect meter readings

ratkid132

I can't believe this was down to an estimated reading, though there were estimated readings in my history to be fair:

I can't link to it but you can have a look

yfrog.com/12capturewyp

And we've never done our own meter reading someone has always come around and read it for us, so I'm hoping it isn't down to human error either.

---lee---

You mentioned high usage in the winter months. Do you use a tumble dryer? They use a lot of juice. 2KW electric fire is also a big draw.

Premier_2

ratkid132 wrote: »

...And we've never done our own meter reading someone has always come around and read it for us, so I'm hoping it isn't down to human error either.

Seeing the tiny amount billed in the previous year, it looks like Jan_Mar represents a catch up

ratkid132

So are you saying the whole of April 08 to December 08 is abnormally low, and Jan 09 makes up for that?

Oh and yes, we have a combi washer / dryer

Premier_2

ratkid132 wrote: »

So are you saying the whole of April 08 to December 08 is abnormally low, and Jan 09 makes up for that?

...

Yes.

If you extrapolate that, it's equivalent to about just 1500kWh per year.
That is very low, only about £200 per year on electricity.

Cardew

ratkid132 wrote: »

I can't believe this was down to an estimated reading, though there were estimated readings in my history to be fair:

I can't link to it but you can have a look

yfrog.com/12capturewyp

And we've never done our own meter reading someone has always come around and read it for us, so I'm hoping it isn't down to human error either.

The bar chart does indeed seem to indicate that under-estimated readings were the cause of your high bill for the period Jan to March this year.

If you look at the consumption for the previous quarters(shown in blue) they are very low - and considerably lower than the corresponding quarters this year.

So this indicates that the bills for those quarters were very probably based on under-estimated meter readings and the Jan/mar quarter is a 'catch up' bill as indicated above.

You will need copies of the bills for 2008 to confirm - if you haven't got them, ask BG.

ratkid132

Good point! So wasn't it corrected sooner? Ie why did it take three billing periods before they then remedied the whole lot in one go?

Oh, and, thanks!

edit: Cardew answered that question to

Premier_2

Btw, what does the different shading represent? Is it an E7 tariff with the darker shade representing off-peak usage?

If so, you would probably be better off not being on E7.

ratkid132

I don't actually know, their site doesn't explain it at all, but my tarriff is "Elec Click Energy 5" and my old E7 meter was replaced about a year ago with one that says "OnStream" on it, though I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean anything.

While we're going semi-off topic, I tried to read my new meter today for the first time ever and I really don't understand it. British Gas's website didn't explain it at all either. It has several displays you can cycle through with it's singular button, a few of them are just time / date. Two display power. one with a "t" at the start followed by "6373.3" and the other with an "I" or an "l" or even a one (it's just two lines, how am i supposed to tell!) followed by "5045.2"

These didn't change as I looked at them, though they may have now it's been a few hours I suppose. But what on earth do they mean?