High energy bills

Jibber123

Our house is a 2 bedroom bungalow, which has 2 extra rooms created in the loft, so making it 4 bedrooms. But like i said these 2 loft rooms are not used most of the time. The house has cavity walls and a solid concrete floor. The windows all have secondary double glazing fitted inside the original single glazing, (so in essence triple glazing). Apart from the dining room which is all single glazed, but we only tend to use this room if we sit down for a family meal on weekends, so we keep the door shut and the radiator TRV turned right down the rest of the time. There is also a log burner in the dining room which we light when we use the room to help warm it up as it's a very cold room, North facing and shaded by large trees.

GunJack

Your gas use is pretty high, if it was 9000kwh it would save you around £15 a month...(5000kwh @ 3.52p per kwh)

Jibber123

There is an immersion heater fitted to the hot water cylinder but it went wrong just before we put the new central heating in a year ago. It blew the fuse and I've not bothered replacing it as we don't need it anymore. It's left turned off in the airing cupboard and the fuse is removed. Also the MCB is turned off in the fuse board as it's on it's own circuit.

Robin9

Jibber123 wrote: »

Our house is a 2 bedroom bungalow, which has 2 extra rooms created in the loft, so making it 4 bedrooms. .....................................

That's part of the problem ............. whereas in a house the bedrooms get incidental heat rising from the ground floor in a bungalow you need more heat.

Loft insulation ? 300mm or more; wall insulation ?

Jibber123

I also forgot to mention I was given some solar water heater tubes by a friend, which I've set up on the garage roof and connected to an old mains pressure hot water cylinder that i found on eBay, and I've setup an outdoor shower to use the free hot water. So from May to September I turn off the gas boiler completely, we just boil a kettle if we need a sink of hot water. The kids love it although i'm not sure the wife's 100% sold on the idea yet, especial as the energy bills still seem to be sky high, and i told her it would save us some money.

Jibber123

I expected a detached bungalow to use more energy than our previous 3 bed semi, but that always used to be nice and warm around 20-21C, and we only paid £50 a month gas and electric. Our Bungalow is considerable cooler most of the time, friends even joke they have to put a jumper on when they come round and i'm now paying 3 times as much. There is that fiberglass insulation under the bedroom floors upstairs and from what i can see the walls and sloped parts of the roofs upstairs that form the walls and ceilings in the bedrooms all have that foil backed king span insulation fitted. I did have to repair some water damage plasterboard around 1 of the Velux windows and i brought a sheet to fill in a piece that was missing i think it was 75 or 100mm think from memory.

I have looked at getting the cavity walls filled but i've heard of a few cases where damp soaks in as the air gap is lost, a few of the installers i looked at don't recommend fitting it to exposed North-East elevations, which rules out 50% of our walls.

RelievedSheff

The orientation of the house could be part of the problem and what is making it feel cold. If a lot of it is north or east facing it won't get any/much help warming up from the sun.

You have something using a lot of electricity so time to find out what it is. Are your outside lights LED or halogen?

Talldave

Agree, for a home that's using gas for heating and water and has fitted LED bulbs you're using silly amounts of energy at night. Time to switch off those PIR controlled security lights?


At night, you should be able to get well under 100W. Is there an ancient fridge or freezer struggling to stay cool?


Your annual electricity consumption exceeds mine and I've recently started renting a large house with well over 100 lightbulbs, many halogen (the LED conversion project plods on!).


Keep going on the detective work!

Jibber123

there are only a few outside lights all are led and on PIR's i agree electricity seems high but i don't know why. is it worth getting the meter checked they said this would incur a hefty charge!

Gerry1

Take hourly night time readings and see where all the usage is ! Don't get the meter checked until you've conducted tests with known loads and found the readings are incorrect.

Are all the readings your own? With modern meters it can be quite easy to misread them or press the wrong button.