New flat, high electricity costs?

avaratz

Hi there,

My girlfriend and I are new to London and we've just moved into a little studio flat. It's really tiny (bedroom/lounge, small kitchen and bathroom). Our electricity is on a prepayment meter with EDF energy and is currently costing us around £1.50 per day. The sum total of our electric use is:

1x water heater running throughout the day
2x laptops charging around 10 hours a day
1x tiny TV and freeview decoder used max 2 hours a day
1x new-ish fridge which claims to use 0.4kw/h per 24 hours
1x small electric griller/stove used once a day
1x 100w lightbulb (soon to be changed to energy saver)
2x energy saving bulbs
We use the kettle around once a day and maybe the toaster twice a week.

We've just moved out of a 4 bedroom house share with 5 people in it and the average cost there was around £2 a day with nPower with a full electric oven/stove being used 3 times a day, 2 fridges running and 4 laptops constantly charging. Obviously lights on in each room too. The only difference is that there was an economical heating system for the shower water as opposed to the water heater that we have now.

I can't understand how we're paying so much at the moment here? And from what I can gather EDF is one of the cheaper energy suppliers for our area if not the cheapest. Is it possible that someone else is using our power or that the electricity meter is faulty? The kwh on the meter with just the water heater and fridge running is around 3350 kwh (is that a monthly reading?).

I'm terrified for winter when we'll need to use heating, as I'm sure that's going to push our bill to over £2 per day. Our landlord told us we'd spend max £40 per month (£1.3 day) in winter before we moved in and now it's looking like we'll be spending over £60.

Thanks for the help, I'm new to the whole prepaid electricity thing and I've tried my best to understand the kwh reading and find out what an average is but still can't make head or tail of it all.

HappyMJ

avaratz wrote: »

Hi there,

My girlfriend and I are new to London and we've just moved into a little studio flat. It's really tiny (bedroom/lounge, small kitchen and bathroom). Our electricity is on a prepayment meter with EDF energy and is currently costing us around £1.50 per day. The sum total of our electric use is:

1x water heater running throughout the day
2x laptops charging around 10 hours a day
1x tiny TV and freeview decoder used max 2 hours a day
1x new-ish fridge which claims to use 0.4kw/h per 24 hours
1x small electric griller/stove used once a day
1x 100w lightbulb (soon to be changed to energy saver)
2x energy saving bulbs
We use the kettle around once a day and maybe the toaster twice a week.

We've just moved out of a 4 bedroom house share with 5 people in it and the average cost there was around £2 a day with nPower with a full electric oven/stove being used 3 times a day, 2 fridges running and 4 laptops constantly charging. Obviously lights on in each room too. The only difference is that there was an economical heating system for the shower water as opposed to the water heater that we have now.

I can't understand how we're paying so much at the moment here? And from what I can gather EDF is one of the cheaper energy suppliers for our area if not the cheapest. Is it possible that someone else is using our power or that the electricity meter is faulty? The kwh on the meter with just the water heater and fridge running is around 3350 kwh (is that a monthly reading?).

I'm terrified for winter when we'll need to use heating, as I'm sure that's going to push our bill to over £2 per day. Our landlord told us we'd spend max £40 per month (£1.3 day) in winter before we moved in and now it's looking like we'll be spending over £60.

Thanks for the help, I'm new to the whole prepaid electricity thing and I've tried my best to understand the kwh reading and find out what an average is but still can't make head or tail of it all.

Your landlord is telling you lies. An electrically heated property at £40 a month in winter. I don't think so. That's not much. You need to compare and switch to get the best deal. If you are a low user then Ebico does a great prepayment meter tariff with no standing charges and no tiered rates. (Note: if you use more than average it's an awful tariff.) You need to enter your annual figures and have a look.

Can you time the water heater to only come on during the night so you are only charged the night rate? The water will stay warm until the evening.

avaratz

Thanks for the help. We're from South Africa so really have no idea what the average cost of electricity is in London... it just seemed extremely high compared to our previous house share.

With regards to the water heater, the only real control I have over it is an on/off switch on the wall which I'm too scared to use (I switched it off once to try and check how many kwh it was using and it let out a huge spark). Would it be better to just manually switch it off in the morning and back on at night? Or vice versa?

Gillyx

We live in a tiny flat, it's a bedroom, a bathroom, and a living/kitchen area. We're paying £52 a month for electricity, we pay our heating separate as it is gas.

I would say what you're paying is probably about right. We had our quarterly bill in, and we're only £4 in credit.

chris1973

The prepayment meter will probably also deduct a daily standing charge, depending on the tariff you are on. Usually this can be anything from 15p - 30p per day, and this will also come out of the credit on your Meter.

An average immersion water heater consumes 3KW of Energy, this is 3 units of electricity per hour when running constantly (ie heating from cold), so at 15p per KW/H this will be 45p per hour. Once it has reached its temperature the element will switch off, and then switch itself on/off through the day as the water temperature drops, I find that my immersion uses around 55p to heat the tank, and then a further 15p - 25p to top up the heat through the day / evening. So allowing for your other use and any daily standing charge deduction, your figures are pretty normal. You will find that this increases drastically though when you start to run any Electrical Heaters.

If you have a tariff called 'economy 7' then your meter has two tariffs - a cheap rate one for 7 hours during the night, and a higher tariff which is charged during the rest of the day. Therefore on this type of Tariff it is much cheaper to heat the water during the night, however if you are on a standard tariff where you pay the same rate all of the time, then there is little benefit to doing that, but you will find heating and water heating every expensive on a standard tariff, compared to Economy 7