Very High Gas Usage

nmills39292

Hi everyone, I am looking for some advice regardinb vary high gas usage. We are on a top up meter and in the past 8 days I have topped up £40. Before this I had contacted utilita because of the meter eating the money and they sent out an engineer to fit a smart meter, on arrival he told us we had a gas leak! After fitting the new meter the leak remained and he had to cap the gas. I then had scottish gas out that day who said there was an issue with the boiler... a part was faulty and gas was constantly flowing into the boiler and out the flue. He fitted a new part and told us problem solved... clearly not. Does anyone have any advice? I doubt its the meter as we had a new one fitted. I called utilita and they tell me the gas is constantly very high.. do I have my heating on at 27/28 all night and most of the day? Em no I do not. I have downloaded the app and every day we are using over 75kwh, on Friday it shows close to 125kwh. Help!

Cardew

Welcome to the forum.



75kWh even at 4p/kWh is £3 a day - £21 a week and 4p/kWh is very high.


Have you any debt on the meter?

grumpycrab

nmills39292 wrote: »

I have downloaded the app and every day we are using over 75kwh

That is possible. Is somebody in all day? How many radiators?

nmills39292

Hi, no debt, I checked this with them as I know there was issues with the previous tenant. It is showing on the app the minimum is £3.50 a day going up to £5 per day. We dont take baths and its an electric shower, only using gas for cooking one meal at night, hot water for dishes and the heating. When we run even the hot water the little smart meter indicator thing shoots way up to “high” gas usage.

nmills39292

Hi, there are 7 radiators, is that alot? Its a 3 bed end terrace so not a detached mansion as £40 a week may indicate haha! The heating is not on all day at night as utilita has suggested and it is never any higher than 21/22.

nmills39292

Our tariff is: unit rate one 5.181p and unit rate two: 3.563p. Unit rate one is for the first 488kwh of gas used per month, unit rate 2 is for all remaining gas used in the month.

Is this an expensive tariff? Our last house we were with eon and didnt have any issues (£50 direct debit a month and always ended up in credit!)

grumpycrab

nmills39292 wrote: »

Hi, there are 7 radiators, ... The heating is not on all day and night and it is never any higher than 21/22.

Ok, 1. roughly how many hours is the heating on? 2. Assuming the rads all have TRVs, how many of them are fully open (IE fully on)?

nmills39292

I would say maybe 6 hours in total, I would need to write it down to be sure but it is not on all day and night.

nmills39292

We went round and turned some of the radiators down as when the heating on the bedrooms and toilet can get very hot while the livingroom / kitchen need them to be fully on to heat the place up. 3 fully on and others turned down.

grumpycrab

nmills39292 wrote: »

We went round and turned some of the radiators down as when the heating on the bedrooms and toilet can get very hot.

Very good idea! Others will be along to suggest how you should manage the thermostat etc etc.

Regarding your tariff, I'm not familiar with top up meters but 5.181p is twice the unit rate I pay on a normal meter. And you will pay that rate for about a quarter of your usage.

nmills39292

Thanks, I have an engineer coming tomorrow as we cant go on like this, if it turns out there is no issues I will see about changing to another tariff.