Extremely high electric bill - please help!

lil_girl

Hi, We have had our electric bill through and its £180 PER MONTH! We are with EDF and I actually rang them with the reading! We have a 3 bed cottage style house and it is electric throughout (no gas), we just use the normal stuff ie 2 tv’s, cooker, washing machine and tumble dryer (once a week), but we have those night storage heaters which we use ( we only use about 4 of them) so we have the cheap night rate and the normal day rate. I make sure everything is switched off when we not using it, so nothing is left on standby etc. We also have our boiler on all day/night as I cant find the timer switch for it. Is this normal for an all electric house? I understand its been a cold winter but surely £180 per month is a bit excessive as its only me and my partner and we both work during the day! I really don’t know what to do, I have spoken to EDF about this and they havnt been much help – just seem to want my money! Please help.

spiro

You say "We also have our boiler on all day/night " which I presume is elec powered. This means you will be using it during the day when what you pay is a lot higher. Also people on here quote about £1200 per year. So £180 in a month is less than twice 1/12th of that. Given the recent weather and you having the boiler on 24/7 this may not be far out.

The other factors are obviously the level of insulation; double glazing, cavity wall insulation, thinkness of loft insulation (they now recomend 250mm) etc

JennyR68

Have you recently moved in this house? £180 certainly doesn't sound too far out of the way for an all electric house in winter. What tariff are you on? Only real way to save after you'e gone down switch everything of route is making sure your on cheapest tariff available.

Whether your in or not during the day doesn't really make much difference I don't think, when your using night storage for heating. I'm in today and my monitor is chuntering away quite happily at 17w at the moment. Not a huge drain!

allan673

i think its really expensive, £180 per month !!! is that a monthly direct debit, i.e £2160 for the year?
just had my quarterly bills, gas £200, elec £80, 3 bed detatched. so double mine for the quarter?
plus in the summer my bills are next to nothing i.e £50 gas, £60 electric.
i know you cant compare but in my previous house which was all electric the annual bill in 2008/9 was £1300 for a 3 bed house.

how many kwh are you using per month - year, what tariff are you on?????

get a heating engineer out asap, invest in new controls, programmable stat etc.

JennyR68

allan673, they said they 'just had a bill in', not that their 'DD had been set at'. Have you worked out how much of your annual £1300 covered the winter months? I too spent £1300 last year on just over 16,000kwh. The Feb - May quarter averaged out at £143 a month running 3 storage heaters. I strongly suspect if that quarter had been totally in the coldest winter in 30 years then that average would have been higher.

Your right though, you can't tell from price paid how much use has been made, need details of kwh to tell whether use is high or not.