is £30 plus a week the going rate for one gas radiator

silverfurs11

hello, i put £40 in my gas meter last monday and today i notice its nearly all gone.
i only use 1 radiator for about 13 hours a day.
i have a gas cooker which i dont use much except for boiling kettle or maybe cooking chips and i have a bath twice a week.
i have a meter where you have to put money on a gas card.
all my savings are now gone so i am not going to put heating on from tomorrow.. i get a lot of pain in a unheated room due to a illness i have so i,m not looking forward to this winter.
does £30 up sound right for what i use?...
i also use about £14 electric a week
i live in a house rented from my local housing association who have just put a new gas boiler thingy in so i am not using outdated thingys..thankyou

back_against_the_wall

Very sorry about your situation. Heating is very expensive and it sounds like most of your money has gone in having your radiator on most of the day. You can economise by turning your radiator off for a couple of hours. If you have the heating on half the day then you are going to run up large bills. There is really no way around this. It is terrible the way energy companies are seeking to pass all their costs onto vulnerable people on a low income while also maximising their profits. I have no heating on at all despite the cold weather because I am already being charged £70 a month by Npower and now they want to increase this to £95 based on very suspect meter readings. If I turned on any heating my bill would shoot up so I suffer in silence in a freezing cold flat. Is this the way people are supposed to live? Just to make more money for the money grabbing energy companies? The Tory government makes all sorts of proposals to regulate the energy companies but nothing ever happens and the bills just go up and up beyond what anyone not in employment or pensioners like me can possibly afford.

Wywth

silverfurs11 wrote: »

hello, i put £40 in my gas meter last monday and today i notice its nearly all gone.
i only use 1 radiator for about 13 hours a day.
i have a gas cooker which i dont use much except for boiling kettle or maybe cooking chips and i have a bath twice a week.
i have a meter where you have to put money on a gas card.
all my savings are now gone so i am not going to put heating on from tomorrow.. i get a lot of pain in a unheated room due to a illness i have so i,m not looking forward to this winter.
does £30 up sound right for what i use?...
i also use about £14 electric a week
i live in a house rented from my local housing association who have just put a new gas boiler thingy in so i am not using outdated thingys..thankyou

Why do you only use 1 radiator?

You have gas central heating. It should have a number of radiators to heat the entire house powered by one boiler, hence the term central heating.

If you only propose to heat one room, it's best not to do it via a central heating system.

If, especially because of medical reasons you state, you suffer particularly from the cold, I suggest you heat the whole house using the gas central heating system provided.

HappyMJ

silverfurs11 wrote: »

hello, i put £40 in my gas meter last monday and today i notice its nearly all gone.
i only use 1 radiator for about 13 hours a day.
i have a gas cooker which i dont use much except for boiling kettle or maybe cooking chips and i have a bath twice a week.
i have a meter where you have to put money on a gas card.
all my savings are now gone so i am not going to put heating on from tomorrow.. i get a lot of pain in a unheated room due to a illness i have so i,m not looking forward to this winter.
does £30 up sound right for what i use?...
i also use about £14 electric a week
i live in a house rented from my local housing association who have just put a new gas boiler thingy in so i am not using outdated thingys..thankyou

Sounds a bit much...

How many units did you get for your £40? Assuming you are with a company such as Ebico (not always a good choice but worth considering when using a key meter) then you would get 790kWh. 790kWh divided by 7 days is 113kWh divided by 13 hours is 8.7kWh which is very high for one radiator even taking the inefficiency of using a boiler to only heat up one radiator.

One radiator should not use much more than 2kW every hour for a moderate sized room to maintain the temperature around 21 degrees.

You really should have a few radiators on if you feel pain in cold rooms...even if the temperature of them is turned down to 16 degrees it's a lot better than going into an unheated room even for a short time which may be less than 10 degrees or even lower.

good_advice

Hiya, it is no fun living in the cold but a lot do including me!
Having the radiator on for 13 hours each day will be using lots of money. We have our Ch on just for 3 hours each day.We have a coal fire but it does not get lit every day due to costs.

The advice is to layer up with clothes, hot drinks and a hot water bottle. Keep doing little jobs/choirs as moving around keeps you warm. Go out for a walk.

Take care...

macman

Do you have debt on the meter? Your (apparent) consumption is not consistent with what you say you put in the meter. Please post your actual kWh usage, rather than ££'s spent.
Using gas CH to heat just one rad is very inefficient.
How do you heat your hot water? If your hot water, heating and cooking are all by gas, I cannot imagine how you can be spending £56pm on electrcity?

chris1973

One radiator should not use much more than 2kW every hour for a moderate sized room to maintain the temperature around 21 degrees.

This assumes of course

(a) The radiator is in the same room as the main thermostat, chances are the Stat is in a freezing cold unheated hallway, sat at 13c and set at 21c room never gets to 21c, stat continues to constantly call demand from the boiler, resulting in it constantly circulating water, causing boiler to heat more, using more gas.

(b) 2kw is enough to actually heat the room that the OP is trying to heat. If its a large room or a poorly insulated property, and 2kw is not an adequate heat input for the room then it never reaches the selected temperature, see (a) above

OP is also on a prepayment meter, and so will effectively be on a bog standard rate from her supplier, without the luxuries afforded to direct debit credit meter customers, on some tariffs, this can easily be well over 5p+ per KW/H plus a weekly standing charge of £1 - £2 a week. Unfortunately, prepayment customers continue to get a raw deal on tariffs and yet, are the most likely to slip into fuel poverty yet it rarely gets a mention here or in the national press.

The OP should check the following:-

(1) That the room thermostat is in the room with the / a running radiator

(2) That after a few hours of running the Thermostat has actually reached the temperature that you have set it at. If not, then obviously the one radiator is not enough to heat the room adequately and will just constantly run trying to do the impossible, costing you £££ because it isn't cycling on/off on demand.

In this situation, you either need to lower the 'set' temperature to the 'current room' temperature after say 2 to 3 hours of running, because its unlikely to climb much further, (more so as the day draws on, evening approaches and the outside temp drops). Failing that you could turn on another radiator and give the room a half decent chance of actually reaching the temp you selected.