Are we paying to much - British Gas

keith.bucknall

Dear All,

I would like to throw this out the forum just for my sainty. At Christmas I purchased an engery saving monitor (the Current Cost CC128 Envi) to start cutting down and comparing our charges.

We have a 4 bedroom semi, 2 adults and 3 children all under the age of 4. I want to see if we are getting charged too much or using more than the average families.

We have Gas & Electric with British Gas on their Dual Fuel tariff, I know that monitors can be +/- 10% but in the last 7 days the monitor states we have used 190 kWh - in 30 days 834 kWh, 1 day 30KwH - is this correct??

The electric is charged at 24.171p for the first 38kWh and then 11.309p - is this ok on comparison? I thought British Gas charged for day time and evening rates but according to above this does not seem right.

Looking at the Gas bill we get charged at 6.819p kWh.

I would appreciate everyone's comments on this as my partner thinks we should not change (due to issues in the past with over charging etc). We have a number of appliances like washing machine, dishwasher and trumble dryer that we have idenified through the monitor and will be cutting down.

Many thanks for your time and co-operation in this.

Keith

Cardew

If you have gas for heating, 25kWh to 30kWh electricity in a day is very high.

You need to check your actual electricity meter rather than the monitor, as this could be highly inaacurate more than 10%.

BG have a nightime cheap rate tariff, but you are not on that tariff and with gas do not need to be.

Only the first 670kWh gas will be charged at 6.819kWh the rest will be between 3.5p and 4p a kWh.

You can find much cheaper tariffs, including with BG - their WebSaver5 is an internet tariff.

However with the very high electricty consumption that you have, it will always be expensive unless you cut down.

keith.bucknall

We have a combi boiler for the heating

penrhyn

Just a plug for the imeasure site, its a bit anal but you can enter your weekly meter readings produce a graph of your consumption/costs and compare your energy footprint with others.

http://www.imeasure.org.uk/index.php

dogshome

Hi kieth.bucknall - Your Elect. use is certainly very, very high, but the answer is probably the Tumble Dryer
We have had weeks of cr*p weather that has denied the use of an outdoor Whirly or line, and with 3 young children in the house your OH has to be running the 2.5Kw Tumble Dryer on overtime, just to keep up with the laundry.

Obviously as the weather improves, T/dryer use will drop, (hopefully to nil), but with 4 bedrooms is there a possibility in putting an clothes airer rack in an unoccupied one?
All the best

keith.bucknall

dogshome - thanks for this and yes we have had this on a fair bit, I forgot to say that I work in I.T and have a number of computers setup as servers but I would not aspect them to use a lot of electric.

In total there are 3 PC's left on 24/7, they have 350W power supplies so I would think it would be them.

Our kettle is old and uses a lot as does the dishwasher which we used to use daily and now only use at weekends.

Washing machine is on either daily or 4 or 5 times over the weekends..

I am getting concerned now.......

Swipe

I thing you'll find that your 3 PCs are using at least 15 units of electric a day

Cardew

keith.bucknall wrote: »

dogshome - thanks for this and yes we have had this on a fair bit, I forgot to say that I work in I.T and have a number of computers setup as servers but I would not aspect them to use a lot of electric.

In total there are 3 PC's left on 24/7, they have 350W power supplies so I would think it would be them.

Our kettle is old and uses a lot as does the dishwasher which we used to use daily and now only use at weekends.

Washing machine is on either daily or 4 or 5 times over the weekends..

I am getting concerned now.......

The size of your PC power supply is no indication of their consumption. Few computers use more than 150watts in the role of servers and presumably you have some power management setup so they hibernate/standby for some of the time?

Even if all 3 drew 150w each for the whole 24 hours, the total for all 3 would be 10.8kWh a day.

keith.bucknall

Cardrew,

They are all connected to a UPS.

macman

Your kettle is a bit irelevant, as it may use a lot, but it is only only for a few minutes each day. If your heating is gas, then the big consumers are: tumble drier, electric cooker, etc. You need to work out which items are causing your high consumption,