Clueless, please help.

fabricfanatic

Hello,

I'll start by briefly explaining my situation. I'm 20 and because of certain circumstances, i need to take care of our bills (my parents house) I have no idea what's reasonable etc and i'm totally lost, not at all energy-aware unfortunately.

We live in a semi detached 3 bedroom house (or 4 bedroom? the garage was turned into a bedroom). 5 people live in the home, 3 adults, 2 kids. 2 of us are at home most of the day. we use the cooker everyday for couple of hours. heating is never on very high. lots of little gadgets phones, tablets that need charging.

We're with ovo energy atm and when I was signing up, I had no idea how this whole energy thing worked at all :embarasse I was quoted £60 a month so i thought it was like a phone contact - fixed, so i switched over. (very silly - I know) So now, £60 direct debits is being paid monthly but obviously we're being charged a lot more than i expected:
Gas:
Unit rate: 2.97p/kWh
Standing charge: 27.40p/day

Electric:
Unit rate: 13.26p/kWh
Standing charge: 27.40p/day


December:
Electricity 827kWh
Electricity £122.26
Gas 3935kWh
Gas £129.47
Total charges £256.75

January:
Electricity 595kWh
Electricity £87.39
Gas 3287kWh
Gas £106.11
Total charges £198.07

These were based on estimated readings. I've sent the reading for February and I'll see how much we are billed. But do these two seem reasonable. Could we get much cheaper?

Also, where do I start with understanding the whole energy thing?? It's so confusing.

Thank you very much for your help, much appreciated!!

D_M_E

Your BIGGGG problem here is the fact that Ovo have been using estimated readings which could be well in excess of the actual consumption.

Was there much difference between the actual readings you supplied and their estimates as detailed on the bills?

What you need are the meter readings from when Ovo took over the supply and the current readings now.

Using these it should be simple to work out how much you should have paid.

Electricity is starightforward.

Gas - multiply the readings by 11.22 (this figure is not exact but is a good enough estimate) to get to Kwh, then if the meter has M3 for cubic meters on it multply nthe result by your unit rate of 2.97p.

If the gas meter has FT3 on it for cubic feet then multiply the answer above by 2.8 to convert the M3 cost to FT3 cost.