Economy 7 or Standard??

misswig

I'm a little confused(Doesn't take much!)

I have just been reading thriough some of the posts about electricity pricing etc.

I moved into my home approx 9 months ago. It is in an area where there is no gas supply so everything is electric. I have a meter which has both peak time reading and also off peak readings. I assumed that this was Economy 7. Is this the case??

Also, when i first moved in i had a problem getting access to the meter so he electricity company have been estimating my reading until now when i recieved a bill stating that i was over £250 in debit (despite paying £35 month DD). I contacted them witht the correct reading which was actually under the reading that they had orginally estimated when i moved in. They are revising the bill and contacting me with revision. Does this mean that i will get a rebate??

As i work full time, i find that most of the time i am running the washing, tumble drier (rarely now), dishwasher and obviously cooking on an evening, i very very rarely put the heating on as i may as well set fire to £20 notes. Does this mean that i would be better using economy 7 (if in act that is what i have) or switching to a standard rate. I also tend to do a fair bit of washing on a weekend.

Please help a confused single mum who is trying to become an MSE!

Oh there is just me, DS(3) and a cat in the house

Thank you

vxx

tripled

As the reading is substantially lower than they had been estimating, the average consumption will be lower than forcast so the bill should be reduced.

Economy 7 means you get cheaper night rate electricity, but it is more expensive in the daytime. Evenings and weekends except in the economy 7 period would be charged at full price.

How is your water heated? Presumably you have an immersion. If you heat the water overnight and you have storage heaters which you use in the winter then you are probably better off on E7. However if you don't use the heating (how do you keep warm!) and use the immersion in the daytime then you would probably be better off on te standard rate.

misswig

tripled wrote: »

As the reading is substantially lower than they had been estimating, the average consumption will be lower than forcast so the bill should be reduced.

Economy 7 means you get cheaper night rate electricity, but it is more expensive in the daytime. Evenings and weekends except in the economy 7 period would be charged at full price.

How is your water heated? Presumably you have an immersion. If you heat the water overnight and you have storage heaters which you use in the winter then you are probably better off on E7. However if you don't use the heating (how do you keep warm!) and use the immersion in the daytime then you would probably be better off on te standard rate.

Kept warm this winter by wrapping up and halogen heaters. I did put the heater in my DS room on before he went to bed so his room was warm. When it snowed, i decamped to my OH house for 3 days!!

tripled

If you do have E7 heating, you will find using halogen heaters in the daytime would cost about 5 times as much per kwh of heat given out as E7. Ok, so you only turn them on when you need them, but I feel it would be difficult to make them an economically effective unless you only use them a couple of days a week.

Don't forget the hot water consideration too!

MATH

You are seriously underusing your off peak electric allowance and from your post appear to be using all your high drain appliances at the most expensive time. As you have no gas supply I would reccomend keep econ 7 and getting econ 7 savvy. Make it work for you, I do not have night storage heating but I can easily make econ 7 work in my favour with a little re-organising of my schedule. It may seem a faff at the start but it soon becomes second nature and you won't think you are making any effort at all.

Make sure your immersion heater is timed to heat up during the off peak times and it will stay hot all day and still be usuable at night.

Time high drain appliances such as your dw, washer and dryer to also use off peak rates. If you work during the day it doesn't matter that you may not empty the dw till the evening providing it washed using cheap rate leccy the night before.

Use you night storage heaters, they will deffo be cheaper to run than hallogen (or any other leccy heaters) at day rates, and by not letting the house drop to a really cold temp before you turn the heat on you will not have to keep warming up the fabric of the building up each time you turn on the heat.

HTH

Fulham_Mark

I'm in the same situation.
I use 1 storage heater over winter and have one short shower a day.
I barely use the cheap rate energy at all in summer.

I've calculated my usage assuming 7p per KWh off-peak, 14p on-peak for an economy 7 tarrif. The I did the same with no off-peak assuming 9p per KWh

My annual bill was as follows:
Economy7 : £833
Non ecomony7: £677

this is quite a simplistic calculation assuming 12KWh per day for all appliances etc and 21KWh per day in winter for the storage heater.

I may be better off switching but I guess that if you enjoy baths or have more than one storage heater on in winter it's probably not worth switching

Cardew

Good advice above.

However remember that use of Washing Machine/Dishwasher in the early hours of morning can cause a significant noise problem(particularly in flats) to neighbours as well. For this reason their late night use is banned in some blocks.

Fulham_Mark

Indeed I cannot use the washing machine or dishwasher in the eves. There is a separate circuit and fuse-box for the cheap-rate electricity. The noise would be a problem.

Looking at my bills above I'm glad I spent £700 on 6.4mm secondary glazing. I know this isn't supposed to make a big difference to heating bills but I went down to just 1 storage heater the next winter after I'd installed it.

From memory, the gap betweeen layers of glass made a difference to the insulation and also noise insulation. Above 10cm, convection currents can occur between the glass panes and significantly reduce insulation. However between 8cm and 15cm provided the best sound insulation. I found some interesting graphs on the sound reduction for high and low pitches depending on glass thickness and gap between layers of glass. I settled on a 9cm gap.

Most standard glass does a reasonable job of reducing noise especially at the top and low end but some mid-range noise still gets through. There is some fancy twin-pane with gel in the middle that is more expensive but has amazing sound reduction.