Advice please: 1st time renting, new build, electricity only

chris112

Hi,

Ive got a tenancy agreement to sign for a new build flat in greater London and have learnt its electricity only, no gas.

I need to sign up to an electricity provider now and ran a few price comparisons,
As a first time renter i was surprised by the quoted cost of £700 p/year

i just assumed it wouldnt be so high for a single personin qa one bed flat

So does anyone have any tips on reducing this cost, besides shopping around

is it generally advised to have a fixed tariff?
i work from home so the pc will always be running

thank you

HappyMJ

chris112 wrote: »

Hi,

Ive got a tenancy agreement to sign for a new build flat in greater London and have learnt its electricity only, no gas.

I need to sign up to an electricity provider now and ran a few price comparisons,
As a first time renter i was surprised by the quoted cost of £700 p/year

i just assumed it wouldnt be so high for a single personin qa one bed flat

So does anyone have any tips on reducing this cost, besides shopping around

is it generally advised to have a fixed tariff?
i work from home so the pc will always be running

thank you

That's about right...it includes heating and you won't have a gas bill.

No I wouldn't advise you get a fixed tariff just yet. I'd go with the best tariff you can find (which may be a fixed one though) without an exit fee which enables you to check every few months if the usage you've estimated is correct or is an underestimate or overestimate and you can switch away to a better tariff without penalty.

Richie-from-the-Boro

Price comparison for what ?.

There are two distinctly different electric space & water heating types, one is 30% cheaper than the other. Tell the group what type of heating you have.

[Deleted User]

You need to find out if you have an eco 7 meter or a standard single rate meter before you sign up or compare tariffs or suppliers.

DavidP24

I have been checking out same thing for my nephew who has special needs and is moving into a 1 bed flat in social housing.

The exising supplier is Scottish Power, he has Gas and Electric so I just followed their online quote, all I said was that property was a flat, 1 bed and 1 occupant.

It came back offering £47 a month for a contract with £30 exit fee for each fuel, or they had a no exist fee one at £51.54 in support of cancer research.

Info used was

Monthly DD
Standard meter
8570 kWha year
2377 k

So I did another search, I changed it to Eco7 and changed the 2377 to 5111, as single fuel it came up with £49.83

So I think you are right, figure your were quoted seems a tad high

Economy7 is a minefield, if the developer put in heaters that are expensive to run you will find out.

Another thing to check for is that the meter timer is working, it is supposed to turn power to eco7 meter at some time between 11pm and 1am for a period of 7 hours and at the same time it is supposed to supply power to the heaters in that window. If that timer switch is not working you can get the heaters receiving electicity on your day meter for the rest of the day.

I have seen this and the bills were eye watering, CAB calculated an £1800 overcharge over the period.

Depending on what floor the flat is on you may be able to manager with turning the heaters off and relying on heat from other flats. This never works on Ground Floor but 1st floor flats have a lower energy rating on sites I checked with new builds about 3 years old.

chris112

thanks for the replies,

the flat is on the 2nd of 3 floors of a 15 property block,
it has:
billing meter, single domestic meter - not eco7

i dont know yet what my kw/year number is to create an accurate quote

footyguy

OP - you need to find out who the existing supplier is and first sign up with them.

Ask the LL, or google how to find out who it is, if you don't know.

The meter will then dictate what type of electricity tariff you can have. If it's a single rate, you can only have a single rate tariff.
If it's E7 meter, then many suppliers will only supply Ey, although a few may agree to supply a single rate tariff.

You will need to get landlords permission to change meter (or get the meter changed back before the end of the tenancy) - many suppliers will charge for a meter change, typically about £50 (although some charge more, and some do not charge at all)

Use a comparison site to find the best deal for you.
You'll get the most accurate results if you have a good idea of consumption in kWh, but it's not essential.

DavidP24

chris112 wrote: »

i work from home so the pc will always be running

thank you

One thing to add, working from home can really add to your electicity usage, make sure it is expensed by your employer.

Not only is it PC, display, printer, router, switch, voip etc etc, but it is you that pays to heat all the water for coffee etc

I had an old PC with a powerful quad core CPU, two drives and a NAS. I got a device off eBay showing how much each used. I worked out I could fund change of motherboard, CPU and RAM by buying modern low energy version. I merged the disks onto one and I powered down the NAS to only when needed. NAS used huge amound of power, had 4 drives and spin down but was like leaving the gas on the amount it used.

Display also important, set to lowest seting, you get used to it in a week, LED displays use far less energy than LCD.

Other thing to check is your fridge freezer, again, I put the metre on it to see what it was using. It was old but worked well, problem is I could buy the which best buy low energy for the additional electricity it used in a year. If your fridge freezer is bigger than your needs and empty you are paying to chill air. So get a smaller one.

Not just about getting best deal, it is about where you are using it.

lstar337

chris112 wrote: »

So does anyone have any tips on reducing this cost, besides shopping around?

Not heating the space or using hot water will reduce it significantly.

On a serious note, an estimate doesn't take into account your personal preferences. So it could be much cheaper if you are young, fit, and don't need a lot of heat. Likewise, if you don't need to use much hot water then that will save you too.

The thing to remember is that heating and hot water will make up the biggest part of your bill, so anything you can do to reduce these will benefit you. Everything else is pretty much pocket change by comparison.

chris112

I just spoke to the current electricity provider and they said i have 2 options with them:

they estimate my 1 bed flat using 3500 watts/units per year
= £589 annually = £49 month =16p p/watt

i use a 2015 27" imac all day, according to apple it would use approximately 120 units x 12 hrs = 1440 watts p/day
the power company said it would equate to around £12 p/day
didnt realise it would be so expensive, and imac's are meant to be very energy efficient too

CashStrapped

Methinks you have got your sums a bit wrong. Or the energy company did.

You/they may not have converted the Watts into Kilowatts to calculated the cost in KWH.


We’ll say your PC uses 200 watts per hour, and you typically leave it on all the time.

Being there are 24 hours in a day, 200 watts per hour x 24 hours = 4,800 watts used per day.


Multiply 4,800 watts a day by 30 days, and that’s 144,000 watts used per month.


To get kilowatts, we divide 144,000 by 1,000, resulting in 144 kW.


Lastly, we multiply 144 kW by the kWh rate set by the electric company.

So 144 kWh multiplied by £0.12 ( a rough guess, there are cheaper tariffs) is a grand total of £17.28 a month. That is how much a PC running all the time using 200 watts per hour would cost per month.

Per day (4,800 watts) equates to£0.57p per day. Thats on 24hrs. In your case (12 hours) it will cost £0.28p a day or thereabouts.