Don't understand my electricity bill!

macman

marc444 wrote: »

cant believe the differences in all your energy prices in this conversation, my house is cold (and damp) all the time, we are all electric, with electric storage heating, which i just cannot afford to run... we have experimeted with the costs of running this heating over the last year after a fierce battle with my provider over huge bills...:mad:

heres a breakdown of my usage overnight for example:

having my appliances and tv's etc on standby and no heating on through the night from 12am - 8am costs us approx £2.....seems resaonable....:)

however, having my appliances and tv's etc on standby through the same duration AND having all my 5 storage heaters on (set to: input 3 output 1) costs us around £16.....not so reasonable....:eek:

before we started these experiments, we had a quarterly bill meter in our home and were not monitoring our usage on a reg basis, like i said earlier we fiercly challenged the huge bills we were recieving and my provider was of no help whatsoever, i reported to the ombudsman, citizens advice bureau, my local MP, a lawyer and the Judge at the Sunday Mail, none of them were any help, seemed they didnt want to get involved in a fight with a energy giant...

after a couple of years of fighting and eventually full refusal to pay for any of my energy until the situation was resolved i got a call from my provider one day stating that they could wipe £3000 off the bill :T leaving my just under £2000 to pay off and pay for current usage, I reluctantly accepted their offer, in my mind the poor administration of my account and attitude i was recieving from frustrated customer service agents as well as the prices i was paying, i should have had the whole lot wiped, i made this clear to them over the phone but they stated that they could only stick to their original offer...

so this left a big bill to pay off and me having to start paying for my current supply after months of refusing to pay in protest, my provider said that the best way to do this was to have a prepay key meter installed that would be set to pay back the arrears at £10 per week, i also asked for an energy monitor and they sent me one, i followed the installation instructions to the letter and the monitor is great for analysing real-time usage of my lights, sockets and appliances......:T

however, the monitor does not seem to register the real-time usage of my storage heating, we have tried turning all our heaters on in peak time for up to half an hour and watch the monitor but it just does not show up, the usage shows up ok on my prepay key meter (like a rocket launch countdown)

a while ago i had some electricians out doing some upgrade work in my home and i gave them a summary of my events with the storage heating and asked them if it would be possible that the wiring or electrics would be to fault as my provider suggested that might be the case, the electricians said it would be impossible and that my energy provider is just trying to pass the buck...

so...im gettin nowhere really, have a young family at home (2 bedroom flat) and when i do stick my heating on to blast the flat with some heat all my rooms are still cold, except the kids bedroom for some reason....

has anyone else experimented with their storage heating in this way?
would love to compare some of your results....

thanks for taking the time to read this, its doing my head in and it feels good to vent off, keeps my fingers warm for a while too

On what basis should they have provided you with 2 years worth of free electricity? Either your meter was faulty or it was not, a test would have determined that one way or the other.
How can you be turning your storage heaters on in peak hours if they are connected to the E7 circuit? If you are running storage heaters on peak rate E7 then of course your bills will be massive.

marc444_2

macman wrote: »

On what basis should they have provided you with 2 years worth of free electricity? Either your meter was faulty or it was not, a test would have determined that one way or the other.
How can you be turning your storage heaters on in peak hours if they are connected to the E7 circuit? If you are running storage heaters on peak rate E7 then of course your bills will be massive.

ok, they never provided me with free energy for 2 years, i refused to make any payments to my bill for 4 months after two years of trying to sort it out and getting nowhere, yeah funny you mention about turning my heating on during peak times, i am aware they are timed to come on at certain times but since the winter kicked in this year i am able to switch my heating on anytime of the day, obviously I only done this for the half hour experiment and am very strict on what time i switcdh my heating on since i noticed this started to happen

marc444_2

macman wrote: »

On what basis should they have provided you with 2 years worth of free electricity? Either your meter was faulty or it was not, a test would have determined that one way or the other.
How can you be turning your storage heaters on in peak hours if they are connected to the E7 circuit? If you are running storage heaters on peak rate E7 then of course your bills will be massive.

trying to find a situation where i would not be connected to E7, unsuccessful so far, any ideas?

macman

You said that you expected 2 years worth (£3000) to be written off entirely. How much are you actually using per year? If that is only arrears, it's a huge amount. What is your annual kWh consumption on each E7 rate.
If you want to come off E7 you just need to ask for a tariff change, this may or may not require a meter change as well, depending on your supplier. But if you depend on storage heaters, why on earth would you want to do that? Your bills will go up masssively.
You need to explain what sort of metering/switching you have and how your storage heaters are wired to it. If switched on, your heaters should start to charge as soon as the meter switches over to cheap rate.
Star keeping a daily log of the meter readings on each rate.

HappyMJ

KellyKing1987 wrote: »

I don't know my annual split... I've only lived here for 2 months, and the first bill we got was significantly higher than our second bill. In which we found the cause - simply turning off the boiler.

The comparison site asked for monthly amounts.

Should I have just multiplied my current bill by 12 to get the annual usage? Even though I've made more changed in the last few days?

Also HappyMJ - I picked the SP Discount 2013 online tariff...

Turning off the boiler? I thought you had storage heating and an electric fire? If you mean the electric immersion heater you really must get a timer and only heat water at night. That will save you at least 30p per day on your current tariff assuming it takes an hour to boost the water temperature using a 3kw element.

marc444_2

macman wrote: »

You said that you expected 2 years worth (£3000) to be written off entirely. How much are you actually using per year? If that is only arrears, it's a huge amount. What is your annual kWh consumption on each E7 rate.
If you want to come off E7 you just need to ask for a tariff change, this may or may not require a meter change as well, depending on your supplier. But if you depend on storage heaters, why on earth would you want to do that? Your bills will go up masssively.
You need to explain what sort of metering/switching you have and how your storage heaters are wired to it. If switched on, your heaters should start to charge as soon as the meter switches over to cheap rate.
Star keeping a daily log of the meter readings on each rate.

no, i said i had £3000 wiped off the bill by my provider, this was because they revealed that they were not billing me correctly at the time and under the Back Billing legislation they have to wipe everything except the most recent year...which left a bill of £2000, during months of contacting British Gas to sort things out and give meter readings, on each occasion they were unable to take a rate 2 reading because they had me down as a rate 1 only customer, could never get my head round why this was the case and each time they said they would look into this and update my account to a customer that has rate 1 and rate 2, this took months of me phoning up and being told the same thing, never met such incompetence in all my life, now im thinking, maybe im still on rate 1 only and this is why im still paying so much, i am not sure what my annual kWh is off hand, i will update that shortly but i am more concerned about the £16 overnight when i use my storage heating..

marc444_2

thanks i will look into the E7 and different tariffs

macman

When you opened the account, did you sign up to an E7 tariff? BG have no idea what heating system you have otherwise.
Your bills will clearly show if you are being billed on a dual rate tariff or not.
If you don't know what your actual consumption is on each tier, I then don't see how you can begin to dispute your billing.

SwanJon

marc444 wrote: »

however, the monitor does not seem to register the real-time usage of my storage heating, we have tried turning all our heaters on in peak time for up to half an hour and watch the monitor but it just does not show up, the usage shows up ok on my prepay key meter (like a rocket launch countdown)

Without knowing the details, I'm not going to comment on the rest of the post, but might be able to help with the monitor not registering night usage.
If your house is wired with the storage heaters on a seperate circuit to the rest, then you'll probably have more wires at your meter than if on single rate (5 instead of 4 for example).
If so, the clip for your monitor will be round the 'day' wire to record your normal consumption, but will not show your 'night' consumption.

You can check how the PP meter is programmed - press the blue button to change the information on the screen.
F will show standing charge + weekly payment to the bill
I will show day price (H day reading)
K will show night price (J night reading)
S will show the remaining bill
T will show the weekly payment to the bill (included in F too)

ahmjt

HappyMJ wrote: »

You paid £4 a day and you think that was a very high bill. January 2010 was very cold. Each of the storage heaters generally cost £1 per night to load up with heat. That would have been 40kWh. At 30% usage at night what else did you use during the day. That would be an extra 80kWh during the day which you could not get for the other £2. Was the 30% at night Kwh usage or cost basis. If it's cost basis then 30% is £1.20 which is possible with two small and inadequate storage heaters set on low input and low output (24kWh each night total) and you spent £2.80 during the day equalling about 15kWh during the day. That's actually 66% at night. You must have had a peak rate heater on or just used a lot of electricity.

The other 30% ratio is 23kWh during the 17 hours of the day which definitely indicates a peak rate heater is being used costing £3.45 and 10kWh at night costing 55p which could easily be used just by the water heater and normal things like the fridge and nothing at all by the storage heating.

It wasn't the storage heaters that were at fault.

£4 a day is high to me . A good storage heater should save me money but I think there was something wrong with them. My guess is (and i could be wrong as I know very little about Electricity and appliances) one of the heater was taking power from day-time quota. During thoese three months at day time I was at work, home was empty, everything else were turned off. And as I was by myself there were very less usage of hot water and cooker (I do not have gas). That was why I was surprised at the amount of bill.

Anyway, before next winter we started using two emersion heater. During 2010-2011 winter the whole family was at home. We had higher (then last winter) usage of cooker, hot water, heater and the bill came to that similar margin.

As it is a rented property I have let the LL know about the storage heaters. So far my experience with storage heater (in two rented place) is not good but I guess I am still not sure how to properly use it.