Shower over £1 an hour!!

F0RSAKEN

Hello,

Please forgive me if i have the wrong thread for this post.

Can someone please tell me whether it is cheaper to have a 20 minute shower every day for a month or a bath which the water is heated by gas. Everyone in this family seem to have a full bath of water... Standard bath size

The shower for 20 minutes will cost at least 33.3 pence on electric which is almost 10 pounds a month.

So the companies are saying showers are cheaper but if the 3 in the house had a shower it would be £30 on electric a month that is 1/5 of our electric bill on showers.

I did get the Kwh cost right on the monitor because we are on Standard tarriff 18.85 pence per hour. We are converting to EDF online saver 7 which is cheapest for us.

I used an electric usage monitor in our house and I believe it is acurate as it is an OWL wireless monitor.

Plushchris

F0RSAKEN wrote: »

I did get the Kwh cost right on the monitor because we are on Standard tarriff 18.85 pence per hour. We are converting to EDF online saver 7 which is cheapest for us.

Not sure you did, even on the standard tariff you shouldnt be charged 18.85p for all of your usage, sounds to me like you are just using your primary rate to do the calculation..

NeverInDebt

20 minute shower, Christ thats long time to have a shower. Get a shower timer you dont need 20 minutes to shower surely?

Are you sure 18.85 per unit is right as said that sound extremely high you should be paying less than that

Plushchris

Shower with your OH and halve the cost immediately!

shortchanged_2

NeverInDebt wrote: »

20 minute shower, Christ thats long time to have a shower. Get a shower timer you dont need 20 minutes to shower surely?

Are you sure 18.85 per unit is right as said that sound extremely high you should be paying less than that

:rotfl:Do any of your family members have any skin left?

KimYeovil

You are correct that electric showers (or gas combi ones) are more expensive than many suspect. But if you are talking about daily showers and baths then there is no need to spend twenty minutes or fill the bath.

It will cost about £1 per hour (though as PlushChris mentions the 18.85p is wrong). Say a 10 kWh shower for 20 minutes is 3.3kWh - so from about 27p per shower.

A 'normal' shower is cheaper than a 'normal' bath - but you are not being normal. Either pays your money and lives with the costs of your sybaritism or start lurking outside with stopwatches and rulers.

samtheman1k

F0RSAKEN wrote: »

Can someone please tell me whether it is cheaper to have a 20 minute shower every day for a month or a bath which the water is heated by gas. Everyone in this family seem to have a full bath of water... Standard bath size

Have I misunderstood this? You'll either have a 20m shower a day, or a bath once a month?


eeuuuuuuuwwwwwwww....:rotfl:

samtheman1k

Seriously though, electrically heated water costs around 3 times as much as gas heated water. Thus, as long as you use 1/3 or less water during a shower than during a bath, then it will be cheaper. Check this by putting the plug in the bath when you have a shower, and if it fills up less than 1/3, then it's cheaper. Of course, connecting a shower to the gas boiler would be even cheaper!

Pincher

Change the bath filler to one with a shower attachment.
If the pressure is no good, add a booster pump, usually near the hot water tank.

grahamc2003

As others have said, you are probably using your tier 1 rate for your calcs wehen you should be using your tier 2 rates, which are typically 10p/kwh (soon to be typically 11p/kwh).

If your shower is 8kw, then that would cost 80p/hr, but its possible depending on your particular tariff to be £1/hr I expect.

My bath (a modern design which uses a little less water than most) needs about 1.3kwh of heat (3kw electric immersion heater for about 20/25 minutes) If I lounge around for ages and top up the cooling bath water with more hot water, then i need about 1.6kwh, so 16p for a long bath in my case.

So for the cost of my bath, you'd get about 11 minutes in the shower.

If you heat the bath water using gas, and the shower with electricity, then the tradeoff is around 4 minutes. (i.e. if you shower for more than 4 minutes, it'll cost more than having a bath).

If you heat both the shower and bath water with gas, then the tradeoff is again 11 minutes.

All ballpark figures, all making reasonable assumptions

HappyMJ

20 minutes in the shower... What do you do? Assuming your flow rate is 8 litres per minute that's 160 litres and by itself it's more than the average person uses over a whole day for all usage. The water for your shower will cost you more than the electric required to heat it. I'd be looking at your water bill. Now I'm sure you're going to tell us you're not on a water meter... Anyway, I'd get the shower times and the average water use including all the other uses in the house down to about 150 litres per person per day which is the UK average.