Gas and Electric - How to get it down

tinkerbellkirst

Hope someone can help us out here, I am trying to get our Gas and Electric bills down each month but it seems no matter what I do its not possible.

We live in a 3 bed semi detached house, 2 adults 2 children.

We are with Scottish Power

Its our electric that's concerning me most at the moment, from 5 June until 20 July we used 341Kwh, that seems a lot to me?

We switch off the standby appliances at the plug when not being used already. Our energy uses over this period total cost us £60.69, this seems ok, our DD is set at £123 a month and we are still £200 in debit Seems to me like we never seem to be able to get rid of this Debit and im worried when we get to winter and the heating goes back on it'll just be totally unmanageable.

So any tips to get the usage down would be grateful, I ideally would like our bills to be around £80-£90 a month which seems reasonable to me.

Hope someone can help.

Thanks
Kirsty

lstar337

Items on standby do add up, but not to much.

Look at your big energy eaters. Anything that gets hot, or cold, will be the ones to look at.

Do you have:

• Electric hob/oven
• Electric heating (of any kind)
• Electric water heating
• Electric shower
• Tumble drier
• Washing machine

These will be the heavy hitters. Look at reducing how much you use them, and how you use them.

What kind of tarrif are you on?

daveyjp

7.5 kWh per day. Not excessive if you have any of the items listed above. The one which does catch homeowners is an electric shower which could be rated at 10 kWh. Just half an hour of showering is 5kWh of the total.

Nada666

53 kWh is low, about two thirds of the national average. Not much more than £30 per month. As mentioned by Davey, the electric shower is the main overlooked (and carelessly used) guzzler.

One possibility is to make one or two lump sums to clear the balance now before winter - sounds bad on top of the £123 monthly payments but it does mean when the instalment is reviewed it can have a decent amount lopped off - that should easily put it back to your target.

tinkerbellkirst

Thanks for the input, It probably isn't that high but it certainly feels like it, our bills used to be about £80 a month but seem to have crept up, I guess its just in the price increases.

We do have an electric shower, I wouldn't say its over used, I shower pretty quickly OH is probably more careless with this and can stay in ages! The kids are pretty quick in and out and also have baths occasionally. We have a tumble direr which I try not to use unless desperate but do use a fair bit in winter, and it feels like the washing machine is almost constantly on, I guess this is where we are using most of the energy.

Will be working on reducing the usage of all these things asap and see how we go.

Thankyou

matelodave

I'd reckon you are doing quite well if you can keep it that low

We are quite energy savvy but I really struggle to get ours down to less than 8-9 units a day (I could do a bit more if my wife didn't leave stuff on all day). But we do have to work at it - read & record the meter weekly and give the supply company a monthly reading. By reading the meter regularly we can identify any anomalies and keep our eye on what we are using and make sure our bills are correct.

We are both at home, both use computers throughout the day. We've got a router, computer networking stuff an A+ fridge, A+ freezer, watch TV for about 4 hours a day (42" LCD, surround sound, SkyHD box) we cook with electricity, heat our water with it and use a washing machine, dishwasher and occasionally a tumble dryer (today we'll use about 14 units as it's been a washing day with tumble drying - 4 loads for each). Most of our lighting is LED or low energy and everything gets shut off at the mains when not in use (including the washing machine, tumbledryer and dishwasher even the cooker, TV, computers and stuff)

Even when we go away, with just the freezer and computer networking stuff on (surveillance camera as well) and the SKY box on stand-by we still use about 3.5kw'h a day.

We do heat the house with electricity as well, but with a heat-pump, so our winter usage skyrockets (1500kw in January this year). We end up using about 8500kw a year which is costing us about £900 (£75 month) this year, probably going up to just over £1000 (£85 a month) next year when our exiting deal runs out.

lstar337

tinkerbellkirst wrote: »

Thanks for the input, It probably isn't that high but it certainly feels like it, our bills used to be about £80 a month but seem to have crept up, I guess its just in the price increases.

We do have an electric shower, I wouldn't say its over used, I shower pretty quickly OH is probably more careless with this and can stay in ages! The kids are pretty quick in and out and also have baths occasionally. We have a tumble direr which I try not to use unless desperate but do use a fair bit in winter, and it feels like the washing machine is almost constantly on, I guess this is where we are using most of the energy.

Will be working on reducing the usage of all these things asap and see how we go.

Thankyou

Are you on economy 7?

You don't need to be, but if you were you could balance out some costs by doing certain things in unsociable hours. We use our tumble from about 4am to make use of the cheap rate. Also getting up and showering before 8am is all at cheap rate.

If you are doing a lot of washing, try dropping the temperature. I recently found that our hot water pressure is too low for our hot fill washing machine, so we have been effectively doing everything in a cold wash for a whole year. How has this affected the washing? Not one bit as far as we can tell. The clothes go in dirty, they come out clean. We have come to the conclusion that warm washes are unnecessary.

There are still a few ways to save, even if you are doing a pretty good job of it already.

Our consumption is currently about 5 units per day, and 3.5 units per night. These are the averages for July. Compare that to April this year, 9.8 units per day and 26.9 units per night.