night storage heaters and obscene bills!

ladysunter

I am with Spark (not by choice - came as default with my new tennancy and have been rying to ditch them ever since!)

Bill arrived yesterday for past 2 months with ACCURATE and upto Date readings and the bill is £709.43! our home has NO GAS supply and relies on electric night storage heaters.

We run two night storage heaters throughout the night, when they are full they stop using electric (so our electrician assures us) Other than this the house is empty all day through the week and myself and my partner use little electirc on a night, tv and a laptop for 3 -4 hours, and that is literally it?

is it the heaters that are at fault, the energy companies calculations? we will of course conntact spark, but thought we would ask for other peoples views/experiences to better arm ourselves

Dunroamin

Sorry to be obvious but do you actually have a cheap rate electricity supply at night?

ladysunter

yes, our billl is worked out by adding the night time cost and daytime cost together, night time cost is 9.5p per unit and daytime 21.98p a ( I know this is very high, we have been battling spark to swap suppliers, but thats another story)
I checked our DAYTIME meter reading from 1st September to 17th December, and using these costs Spark have charged us approx £470 for ou daytime rate (the house is empty from 9-5 during this time!)

buglawton

Night storage heating is loved by landlords (passes all hidden costs & overheads to the tenant), hated by tenants and avoided by owner-occupiers.

The national scandal is that landlords are not being incentivised to install proper central heating.

ladysunter

I hate em too, but surely they dont cost a tenner a day to use (and heat our sitting room very very very poorly)

Dunroamin

ladysunter wrote: »

I hate em too, but surely they dont cost a tenner a day to use (and heat our sitting room very very very poorly)

From what you've said, it isn't the night storage heaters that are making your bills so high as it's the daytime electricity costs that are though the roof.

Using your figures, the heaters are only costing you £239 (£709 - £470) to run for the period.

ladysunter

which is what really bugs us, through the working week, the house is empty and NOTHING is on, tv unplugged and energy saving plugs/times etc used.

jaybeetoo

I suggest you get an electricity energy monitor (e.g. http://www.theowl.com) and start to track down what is eating your electricity during the day.

Dunroamin

Do you supplement the NSH with any other electric heating in the evenings? Is your water heated at night? How often do you use the dishwasher/washing machine/tumble dryer and do you use the cheap rate electricity to run them?

Have you tried checking what electricity you're using from when you get in until the cheap rate starts?

ladysunter

does it seem feesable that in the past four days we could have used 119 daytime untis (nobody home, tv unplugged etc etc etc) i mean I dont know what you gt for 1 unit of electric, but i know in our last home we used under 10 a day!

HappyMJ

Get onto Spark and change tariff.

At the very last go onto direct debit and your rates will drop dramatically.

Ask Spark as nicely as you can to backdate the change to when you moved in and re-bill you.....

SWITCH ...ASAP...that's one of the worst tariffs I've seen. I've just checked it and the rates you quoted are correct for payment by cash quarterly.