Depressing results from Comparison sites today!

good_advice

Good morning, I have just been reading through your post.
You want a light shed on your huge bill?
OK, having the heating on for 8 hours a day.
Anything that heats up..cooker,tumble dryer, iron, kettle.

You are doing the right thing with a meter change and buying a monitor. Moving tariffs.

The heating is costing and the paper today said fuel bills will rise again next year, taking into account we have to pay for all the green measures.

People are having to learn to live in cooler/cold homes.
Some people are installing wood burner stoves.
Go to bed an hour earlier in winter it saves an hour on the heating.
Heat up a smaller room.
People are getting crafty.

Take care...

jalexa

TraditionRules wrote: »

Note this is obviously my 'winter' gas usage with heating on 6am - 10am then again from 6pm - 10pm roughly.

With the figures I recorded can anyone shed any more light on my HUGE bills?

The timings in isolation are not that important. The issue is whether or not you have a roomstat fitted, in which room and set to what temperature.

Cardew

TraditionRules wrote: »

Hi everyone, an update on this...
So I've had Npower switch the electric meter to a single rate meter for starters. I've also got an Energy monitor which I'm putting in tomorrow.
I've read my meters at Noon each day over a recent 7 day period & took the following readings:

GAS

Day 1: 04644 63
Day 2: 04657 32
Day 3: 04669 80
Day 4: 04683 01
Day 5: 04696 30
Day 6: 04709 46
Day 7: 04722 36

Note this is obviously my 'winter' gas usage with heating on 6am - 10am then again from 6pm - 10pm roughly.

ELECTRIC

Day 1: 369
Day 2: 400
Day 3: 427
Day 4: 453
Day 5: 478
Day 6: 507
Day 7: 541

The above is from the new single rate meter fitted last month.

With the figures I recorded can anyone shed any more light on my HUGE bills? Any help appreciated!

Well you are using approx 13 gas units a day which is approx 145kWh or around £5.50 to £6.

Electricity consumption is approx 29kWh a day which will cost around £3.40.

A 2 year old combi boiler should be efficient, so your high gas consumption can only be due to poor insulation and/or the heating set too high; for too long.

Your very high electricity consumption - around 10,000kWh a year is harder to explain - unless you use electrical heaters as well as gas CH!

It should be easy enough with your monitor to track down the culprits.

Forget about little items like TV on standby or phone chargers left plugged in, there are some major causes.

WestonDave

The gas is a bit on the high side - in context my recent usage has been about 95kWh per day. I wonder whether a few cheap thermometers around the place will tell a tale about how much you are heating the house. With the heating on a reliable thermostat ours is set to 18C during the day and 14C over night, however it becomes more difficult if you have a timer rather than a thermostat. The problem with timers is that if you want to keep the house at 18C via a spell in the morning and another spell in the evening, you end up heating the house to a higher temperature so that when it cools down it doesn't drop below 18C.

If you lack insulation (as your upcoming loft insulation suggests) you will lose a lot of heat at that higher temperature and also during the cooling period. However gas is relatively cheap - 5p per kWh compared to 13p per kWh region for electricity, so 50 extra kWh on gas per week will be £2.50, but the 82kWh extra electricity you are using per week more than me is going to be adding around £11 per week to your energy costs. In short your gas is high but potentially within sense if you don't have much insulation and you've got used to having a warmer house than I like - the mystery is the electricity.

The good news is tracking individual electric items to usage is a lot easier than gas appliances. That said the list of potential culprits seems quite short - to gobble that amount of extra power its likely to be some form of heating element which points to an auxiliary immersion element in a hot water tank (shouldn't be as you have a combi and therefore shouldn't have a tank - if you do have one check for wires coming from it and find out where they go!), a lot of cooking on an electric oven, an electric instant heat shower (they will gobble around 1kWh per 6-8 minutes so if someone is having half hour soaks under the shower or twice a day showers knock that on the head pdq), a lot of use of a tumble dryer, or something more exotic like tropical fish tank heater (although that shouldn't use much).

If tracking all the obvious items doesn't reveal a culprit (and I would be inclined to list them - list their power consumption and put it all in a spreadsheet - that way you can create an energy budget showing how much use you can get from each item and how much it will cost) then it might be time for the turn everything off that you know about and see if the meter still keeps turning as that's a sure fire way to know that there is something you don't know about connected to your system.

What would be useful is to list out for us whether you have any form of thermostat on the heating or whether you are restricted to just a timer (if so is it part of the boiler or seperate - a seperate one could be swapped relatively cheaply for a programmable thermostat which will help. Also what you use for cooking (gas or electric) and what you use for showering (electric instant heat shower or off the boiler). If you don't know then the make and model numbers will help us track them down. It is going to take a bit of time and effort but you should be able to get it down significantly once you work out what you are using.

spiro

Typically GSH can be reduced to 1/2hr before you get up to 1/2hr before you leave for work and then again from 1/2hr before you get home to 1/2hr before you go to bed.

As other have said what is the insulation like especially in the loft were the latest standard is about 10"?

thor

good_advice wrote: »

The heating is costing and the paper today said fuel bills will rise again next year, taking into account we have to pay for all the green measures.

People are having to learn to live in cooler/cold homes.
Some people are installing wood burner stoves.
Go to bed an hour earlier in winter it saves an hour on the heating.
Heat up a smaller room.
People are getting crafty.

Lidl are selling those electrically heated type blanket/towels which supposedly eases the disconfort for bad backs. Looking at it, it is just a bath towel which is large enough to cover most of the core part of your torso and is heated up via attached heat pads. Given that it's max power usage is only 100W, I am seriously considering getting one of these and using it when I am at home but not moving about much. It should mean the CH is used less and hopefully a cut in our gas bills.

TraditionRules

OK, a bit of an update now I have the electricity monitor installed...

Providing I've got it set up correctly usage seems to generally hang around the 1.17kW / 0.17p per hour mark.
When I switch modes this shows at a daily average of 21.0 kWh / £3.15.

Right now there's a few lights on in the house, the laptop (modem etc) I'm typing this on, one TV and a few of the other usual bits on stand-by. We DON'T own any electric heaters / electric blankets etc.

How do theses figures sound to people out there?

Ps. Loft insulation survey is now done & booked for Jan 17th install.
There's only currently 60mm in one section & zero in the other.

macman

The usual suspect-immersion heater left on 24/7?
Your average leccy usage is till nearly 8,000kWh pa, more than double the average.

jalexa

TraditionRules wrote: »

We DON'T own any electric heaters / electric blankets etc.

First off all an OT remark, without any electric heaters how will you cope with a GCH breakdown?

One point regarding the usage, you can't just take instantaneous daytime usage and extrapolate a 24 hour figure (unless of course the culprit is your immersion heater as Macman suggests)

Over the course of this thread it has been noted that your electricity usage is inexplicably high. You need to gain confidence in your installed electricity meter which if operating correctly is far more accurate than your cheap Chinese monitor. The normal way to do this is a timed consumption test using a non-thermostatic electrical heater of known rating. Except you haven't got one:(. That would have been a far better investment than the monitor and would be a good buy tomorrow or Monday.

MillicentBystander

If the OP bought the monitor I suggested it got a very good mark for accuracy in the Which test. It's a nonsense to suggest that the leccy meter is the way forward when you are trying to ascertain the effect certain items being on/off has on the consumption - what is the OP to do, place a chair by the meter and watch it all day? Mine is outside, btw. The suggestion I made to buy a £30 monitor was based on the crazy leccy bills the OP was getting - £30 is a drop in the ocean when shown as a %tage of that and the monitor will definitely identify areas for improvement! Plus much of that modest outlay would doubtless be recouped if/when the OP decided it had done its job and was no longer needed.

PS The monitor may even have been free if the OP did as one poster suggested and request one from his supplier, npower. No brainer.