How much should GCH cost to run?

Snakey

In my old flat, I had electricity only and no central heating at all. My hot water was from a boiler that you switched on and off manually when you wanted it to heat up a tankful. My electricity charges were around £5 a month.

My new flat has gas central heating, with a combi boiler so I get hot water too.

My supplier has estimated monthly bills of £40 for electricity and £68 for gas. That's more than twenty times as much! And I thought gas was supposed to be dead cheap!

Before I call them to discuss it... I am fairly confident that I know how much electricity I'm going to be using, but I don't want to throw a tantrum about the gas only to find that actually it does cost £800 a year to shower with hot water and have the heating on in the winter.

Can anyone tell me how to guesstimate my likely cost? It's a two-bedroom flat with single-glazing, I live alone and I'm out at work during the day. I have no idea yet how long you have to have the heating on for to warm the place up and how quickly it cools back down once you switch it off, but I'm a fairly warm person usually (I've just spent five years in a flat with no heating and only really been cold for a couple of months each winter) so I don't anticipate being a heavy user.

dogshome

Hmmm - Your old Elec bills running at £5 a month? - This must be based on a guess as the Service Charge alone before you switched anything on, would have been around £7.50 a month.

The cost of Gas heating relative to the size of the dwellling, is all about insulation - The less of it there is, then the higher will be the Gas bills, so I'm afraid the single glazed windows are a bad omen for the insulation standards on the entire building

HappyMJ

Snakey wrote: »

In my old flat, I had electricity only and no central heating at all. My hot water was from a boiler that you switched on and off manually when you wanted it to heat up a tankful. My electricity charges were around £5 a month.

My new flat has gas central heating, with a combi boiler so I get hot water too.

My supplier has estimated monthly bills of £40 for electricity and £68 for gas. That's more than twenty times as much! And I thought gas was supposed to be dead cheap!

Before I call them to discuss it... I am fairly confident that I know how much electricity I'm going to be using, but I don't want to throw a tantrum about the gas only to find that actually it does cost £800 a year to shower with hot water and have the heating on in the winter.

Can anyone tell me how to guesstimate my likely cost? It's a two-bedroom flat with single-glazing, I live alone and I'm out at work during the day. I have no idea yet how long you have to have the heating on for to warm the place up and how quickly it cools back down once you switch it off, but I'm a fairly warm person usually (I've just spent five years in a flat with no heating and only really been cold for a couple of months each winter) so I don't anticipate being a heavy user.

The estimates look correct for an average user.

Heating is expensive no matter what whether it's gas or economy 7 electricity they both cost about the same. People tend to have warmer houses with gas as it's cheaper per unit but that extra warmth comes at a cost which offsets the savings by having gas.

If you don't use the heating at all you'll only have standing charges which tend to be around the £5 a month mark. The hot water won't cost much. A 28kW boiler at 6p/kW would cost 14p for a 5 minute shower. If you have one shower a day that'll be £4.20 per month on top of your standing charges.....then you need to add extra for the hot water used in the kitchen, bathroom taps etc...

Andy_WSM

Snakey wrote: »

My electricity charges were around £5 a month.

Really?! That suggests a faulty meter to me as my standing charges are more than that a month! If you weren't paying a standing charge then you would have been paying a higher unit charge, so it doesn't stack up.

Approx £100 a month is the usual sort of figure bandied around for an all electric property. If the insulation is poor then more.

I pay £50 gas and £80 electric in a detached 70s build with better than average insulation.

How long you spend at home / lifestyle are obviously big factors too.

whodathunkit

Snakey wrote: »

In my old flat, I had electricity only and no central heating at all. My hot water was from a boiler that you switched on and off manually when you wanted it to heat up a tankful. My electricity charges were around £5 a month.

My new flat has gas central heating, with a combi boiler so I get hot water too.

My supplier has estimated monthly bills of £40 for electricity and £68 for gas. That's more than twenty times as much! And I thought gas was supposed to be dead cheap!

Before I call them to discuss it... I am fairly confident that I know how much electricity I'm going to be using, but I don't want to throw a tantrum about the gas only to find that actually it does cost £800 a year to shower with hot water and have the heating on in the winter.

Can anyone tell me how to guesstimate my likely cost? It's a two-bedroom flat with single-glazing, I live alone and I'm out at work during the day. I have no idea yet how long you have to have the heating on for to warm the place up and how quickly it cools back down once you switch it off, but I'm a fairly warm person usually (I've just spent five years in a flat with no heating and only really been cold for a couple of months each winter) so I don't anticipate being a heavy user.

I also can't see how your previous electricity bills can have been so low, even without heating. £800pa for hot water and heating seems very reasonable to me.

Snakey

Yikes! OK then... that was a cost I hadn't factored in when I did my renting vs buying calculations! So it's like £3 an hour or thereabouts to have the heating on?

The building is not well insulated. It's listed, which apparently means tough luck if you want to modernise.

I truly was paying £5 a month for electricity. I had a discount for paying by Direct Debit so I suppose that means I was using £100 a year rather than £60, and a tariff with no standing charge. Perhaps my boiler was wired up to my neighbour's electricity supply or something.

Pincher

Standing charge punishes the solitary. £100 a year can be spread over five people in one house, or you can have five meters each charging £100 per account.


Solution: take in lodgers.


Beware, Mediterranean women hate wearing bulky clothes, and insist on turning it up to 25 degrees, so the gas bill ends up more than the rent. Solution: have two lodgers, preferably twins that share one room.

matelodave

The best advice is to start reading your meter regularly and recording it so you can get some information on how much you use and when you are using it. Knowing that will allow you to start economising on what you use and optimising your controls. Getting a reference for what you are using during the summer will allow you to see how the heating affects your consumption during the autumn and winter.

Poorly controlled central heating can cost a lot to run so make sure that you've got a decent thermostat - ideally a programmable one which will allow you to adjust your heating times and temperatures to suit your lifestyle.

Hopefully you'll also have thermostatic valves on your rads so you can control your room temperatures independently or even turn it off if the rooms are not in use.

Try to take shorter showers and don't let hot water run down the sink whilst washing or rinsing stuff (including in the bathroom)

Snakey

Thanks. I'm having stuff done to the heating this week (getting rid of microbore pipes) so I'll ask them about the thermostat so see if there's anything they can do while they're there - at the moment there's just one, in the living room. The new rads have TRVs so I can always turn it down/off in the room that I don't use (dependent on the condensation/mould position as there have previously been problems in that room).

I had my pre-payment meters swapped for credit meters on Monday, so as well as needing to pick a tariff in the immediate term I'm also trying to guesstimate my usage in case I need to change providers before the winter. Npower were by far the best for just electricity, before, but I'm all up in the air now about what to do.

The pre-payment meters were great for seeing how much it cost to do specific things, albeit at the ramped-up unit rate that I was being charged. I'll have to actually do maths now.

Cardew

Snakey wrote: »

Yikes! So it's like £3 an hour or thereabouts to have the heating on?

Where did you get that idea?


Gas costs around 4p/kWh.


A Combi for a 2 bed flat might use gas at a rate of around 30kW and that would be when it is supplying Hot Water. So a theoretical 30kWh would cost £1.20 an hour - however in practice you would never run hot water for an hour.


Even in very cold weather, with a cold flat you are unlikely to use more than 20kWh for heating, so around 80p an hour.


As the flat warms up the thermostat will turn the boiler on and off and even 10kWh(40p an hour) would be unusually high.


The average gas consumption in UK is 13,500kWh pa which is around £600 pa on a cheap internet tariff.


Even with gas heating and hot water, average electricity consumption would be £400 - £500pa.


So your £5 a month in the old property was because of a fault.

Snakey

I know it's rude to ask for advice and then argue with it, but since I have moved flat I have been on a prepayment meter with a stinkingly high (to me, anyway) daily standing charge and I have still not been paying anything like ten pounds a week for electricity. It's been more like £2.50-£3, with half of that being the standing charge, and that's with a horrific looking ancient fridge freezer on the go as well.

Perhaps I have a personal static field that makes meters go wrong, in which case I am happy to come round to people's houses and stand in their meter cupboards for a few minutes a week, just drop me a PM with your address and suggested fee.

I am however starting to see that it's possible to calculate what my heating will use, thanks to your post and others! I need to take a look at what the power of my boiler is, to start with, and then compare various unit costs on the tariffs. So if I say 80p an hour (let's pretend it will never get warm enough to switch itself off) then it's all down to how long I have it switched on for, which I expect will be for 3 hours or so in the evening for X weeks per year (X being an unknown... depends how cold it gets in here compared to the last place which was also single-glazed and badly-insulated but it was a lot smaller).

I have always assumed that "average" users are families, like my sister for instance who has the heating on all the time because she has kids and they all have baths/showers most days and a cooked meal every night and the washing machine on daily and all that sort of domestic bliss stuff (apparently there's this thing called "washing up", which just doesn't happen a lot when you live off microwave meals and sandwiches/toast). So I would expect to be well under it. Or hope to be, at least. Depends just how badly-insulated the flat turns out to be I suppose.