Extreme electric bill after giving meter reading

EachPenny

macman wrote: »

Do you have NSH's and an immersion heater? If not, then get off E7 onto a single rate tariff. If you do, then use them and not the oil filled rad. It's that that is costing you a fortune, as is obvious from the bill.

I'm not sure that is likely to help in this case. They are electric only, and appear to have a decent night/day split to make E7 economic. Something is using quite a bit of electricity at night.

What's not mentioned by the OP is how they get their hot water.... is there also an immersion heater (or instant water heater) running in the day time perhaps?

The other thing you need to note OP is you had a significant increase in the unit charges effective from 11 July.

This bill is calculated assuming your electricity consumption is uniform throughout the year, so the 'catch up' energy consumption has been divided proportionately (by the number of days) between the 9 June - 10 July and the 11 July - 31 August periods. If most of your excess energy consumption was last winter when you had the heating on, then that energy should really be charged for at the rates applying back then, not the post-11 July rates.

What you really need is to have a more realistic estimated reading at the 11 July price change. To do that you might need to get them to cancel the previous bills and then recalculate for the whole year (or since the last actual readings) so that the additional consumption is more fairly accounted for across the different unit charge time periods. This won't save you hundreds of pounds, but will knock a small amount off the total.

matelodave

EP is correct that if you dont give accurate and frequent meter readings you can get stuffed with extra costs if the price goes up sometime during the period due to "linear" estimation.

Although you pay your DD as 12 equal monthly instalments most people don't use their energy in equal monthly chunks, about 65-70% is used between November and March (five months) and the other 30-35 in the seven summer months. You therefore need to make sure that you have the lowest cost tariff in the winter.

It's turned out to be a very expensive lesson.

Not only has the OP ended up with estimated bills, he's paid more than he needed to by by remaining on a standard rate in the first place. The cost will be even more because of an unnoticed increase in the tariff during July which means he'll also probably pay for a proportion of last winter's higher consumption at the post July costs as well.

Robin9

OP - one thing you should do straightaway is to transfer within SSE to their best E7 tariff. That might well save you £200 a year