Electric bills out of control - advice needed

silfe

Hi there,

We are a family of 5 (3 young children) living in a 3 bedroom semi-detached council house with old style storage heating (3 of) and a panel heater in each room. It's on the THTC system (17.5p domestic, 9.5p for heating/water).

My wife works 2 days on (48 hour shifts), 4 days off and I'm at home with the kids / studying uni (OU).

We are using £15 a day in electric! £450 a month. We recently asked the hydro to break it down over a month. For the month of October, our heating costs were £120 and domestic was £330..

I simply cannot fathom why we are spending £450 a month on electric, we will soon be declaring bankrupt at this rate. We have a dishwasher, tumble dryer, washing machine and oven that are all A or A++ energy rated.

In October we rarely used the panel heaters due to the energy costs and only 2/3 of the storage heaters were on (though as above the bulk of the bill is not the heating).

Can anyone help me?? From what I gather for our situation and house size our bill should be at the very least half that??

Thanks in advance for any help.

Carrot007

You need to examine the usage yourself. Take daily reads.

Your unit costs are sky high, if you are not using much off peak you might be better off on a single rate but the storage heaters would have to go.

I hope given the unit costs your standing charges are under 10p a day!

Take daily stats and report info in a week to see if people thing it is reasoanble usage.

silfe

That is our monthly useage and has been for a while. £15 a day the meter is going down.

We cannot get off the THTC and therefore are stuck at that tariff. The reason we cannot move is because to do so we would need to purchase our own heaters as the council will not help and we'd have to foot the bill to have the THTC junction box removed and everything rewired through the domestic box which would also require a new box (£200 at least). We've looked into all this. We'd be looking at thousands of pounds to do all this which simply cannot afford.

The fact though is that the heating is costing us £30 a week which is probably normal for storage heating and panel heaters? It's the £85 a week for all the other electricity that's the real problem.

Surely to have a bill of £85 a week even on 17.5p / kWHr you'd have to have all lights and all utilities/tv running 24/7 which obviously does not happen.

I don't understand what is going on here.

The best flat rate tariff in our area even if we could get off THTC (which we can't) is around 14.2p so even then the savings aren't a lot and the heaters would then be on that too, so would maybe end up the same or even more.

I'm lost / stuck / getting in serious debt over this and neither the hydro or council are willing to help / provide advice on what to do.

matelodave

You need to do as Carrot suggests - read your meter every day and roughly the same time (should be easy if you are there all day). Make sure you record both day and night readings and if possible get a feel for what's on and when.

Once you've got a bit of data you can then see when it's being used and what's using it and what happens when you change things.

If you dont monitor it then you can't do anything about it because you dont know what's going on.

Make sure stuff is turned off when it's not in use - check that the meter stops recording when everything is off.

House_Martin

You say the "meter is going down " which leads me to think its a prepayment meter and therefore high tariff. If so switch to a credit meter on a fixed tariff which can lower prices as much as 25%
If its not a prepay meter the other causes of higher than usual billing are transposed meter reading s, night storage users get hit hard when this happens,
All suppliers will transpose the day and night readings at some time.Smart meters are badly needed to stop this farce.

silfe

It is a key meter but we are north of Scotland on THTC. I can get the key meter removed in favour of monthly direct debit for free by the hydro but the tariff will remain the same they said. There is no other companies that take on the THTC tariff. And as said we cannot afford to have the THTC system removed because of the cost of work required / new heater costs.

What is transpose meter readings? Also again it's not so much the heating at 9.5p / kwhr thats costing it's the domestic. I cannot understand why its £330 a month for our lights/tv/fridge etc etc.. that's ludicrous

st999

If you are really using £85 a week that equates to 69 kWh a day for non heating usage at 17.5p per kWh.

Something is far wrong.
As others have said read your meter every day at the same time and post the readings here.

matelodave

Transposed means your meter is recording or reading your heating on the higher tariff and your domestic use is on the lower one.

I#d have thought that most domestic use (non heating/hot water) would average out at about 10 kwh a day, perhaps a bit more if you are at home all day. That should equate to around £1.75-£2 a day = around £14 a week or £60 a month, so it look like your heating is actually using the higher rate tariff.

silfe

Thank you all, something is very wrong, I think I'll contact the hydro again.

What meter readings should I be taking daily to post?

matelodave

How many meter have you got?

I'm guessing you've got one for the higher rate and one for the lower one, althernatively there might only be one but with two registers (you might need to press a button to see what rate you are reading)

You really need to check that the higher rate is only being used when you've got domestic stuff on and the lower rate is the circuit that feeds the heating.

THTC is more complex than normal E7 so you really need to understand how it works to get the best out of it - assuming that there is a way of getting the best out of it bearing in mind the tariff costs.

silfe

st999 wrote: »

If you are really using £85 a week that equates to 69 kWh a day for non heating usage at 17.5p per kWh.

Something is far wrong.
As others have said read your meter every day at the same time and post the readings here.

Is that number solid? As I'm going to phone the hydro and tell them this as it is impossible to use 69kWh daily... I am stressing out badly as this is beyond a joke and going to cause us bankruptcy.