High energy bills

Jibber123

Our fridge freezer is quite old 10 years+ maybe as much as 15 but is in a good condition its a good make and is working fine, doors seals are all OK. Interestingly if i turn the fridge freezer off at the plug the energy monitor jumps up to 5p/h and 0.27kWh so the fridge freezer is actually putting electricity back into the grid? this seems a bit backwards i was expecting it to be quite the reverse as it's old??

Gerry1

Jibber123 wrote: »

Our fridge freezer is quite old 10 years+ maybe as much as 15 but is in a good condition its a good make and is working fine, doors seals are all OK. Interestingly if i turn the fridge freezer off at the plug the energy monitor jumps up to 5p/h and 0.27kWh so the fridge freezer is actually putting electricity back into the grid? this seems a bit backwards i was expecting it to be quite the reverse as it's old??

You should be looking at kW, not kWh.

Robin9

Gerry1 wrote: »

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.

Agree - you will need to burn the midnight oil to get the bottom of the nighttime use. Read your meters for the next few days and get an average usage. Then turn your fridge off for a night and see what the effect is.

Fridges/freezers/immersion heaters/underfloor are all good candidates.

paulcam

""It was still reading 0.23kwh or 4p/h which is £350 a year does this seem high. ""

Not really. I will assume it read "0.23kW" not kwh, ie 230W. Worked out over a year that's about 2100kWh. So for £350 you are paying an average of 17.3p/kWh which is a bit high. It's sort of "off deal" price, with 16p being the preferred deals.

I pay about £36 a month electric. My mickey mouse little meter usually reads between 250W and 400W without anything really discernible turned on. I call this "skeleton power".

These days you need to keep switching supplier. They all have standard tariffs which are higher than they should be, so they can offer discounted rates to new customers. Just be a new customer every year.

On switching things off. It pays to pay attention to what they are. There is a lot of non-sense around switching off your TV and not leaving it in standby, but if you do the sums it just doesn't add up. It's like worrying about a tap dripping while someone if hitting you with a fire hose.

To put it into context... your TV, assuming it was made in the last 10 years, is probably consuming less than 0.5W of power in standby. So it will take 2000 hours before it consumes a single kWh of power. Over a year it IS measurable, at around: 74p per year, but if you consider that a shower will consume that amount of electricity (or gas) in 1 hour it puts things in perspective. A tumble dryer consumes about 5000 times the amount of energy as your TV in stand by. Worry about the fire hoses, not the dripping taps.

If people want to save power for money or environment they need to focus on the big hitters for the big wins. Shower less. Change/wash your clothes less. Lower the thermostat. Drive less miles. Having one less shower a week will pay for all your electronics on standby many times over.

On those 230 watts. If the compressor is running in your fridge and/or freezer this can account for anything from 30W to 100W. The Wifi internet box is around 10W. Devices in standby are around 0.5W. USB chargers are around 0.5-2W charging and 0.05W when complete. Alarm clocks, over clocks, microwave clocks are similar around 0.25W. Rubbish modern LED lightbulbs are about 7W (when they could be half that if they were powered by low voltage). The gas boiler can consume a few 100 watts when running.

If you want to find out what things are actually using you can buy a plugin meter and go around the house putting things into it for a day and taking the reading. It's better to leave them for a day or a week and take an arrogate reading as somethings use power in spikes, like fridges and freezers.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/230V-250V-Monitor-Consumption-Calculator-Analyzer/dp/B07FZZ17ZY/

On "smart energy meters", ie the ones you buy in HomeBase et al. These fall into two categories. Good and rubbish. Most are the later. I won't bore you with the details, but they do not sense the voltage so are unaware of phase and only crudely sample the current and assume the voltage and phase. So their accuracy can be very low especially when measuring smaller amounts of consumption less than 1 kW. You won't be surprised that your utility companies meter at your mains will be much better.

Talldave

Jibber123 wrote: »

Our fridge freezer is quite old 10 years+ maybe as much as 15 but is in a good condition its a good make and is working fine, doors seals are all OK. Interestingly if i turn the fridge freezer off at the plug the energy monitor jumps up to 5p/h and 0.27kWh so the fridge freezer is actually putting electricity back into the grid? this seems a bit backwards i was expecting it to be quite the reverse as it's old??

The condition is irrelevant, it's how many minutes an hour the compressor is running that dictates running cost. Even when brand new your fridge freezer would have had annual consumption way above today's new models. 15 years on, if it's struggling at all the consumption is going to be considerable. Something is pushing your consumption to silly levels, it's not going to be an old DVD player or a wifi router.

Jibber123

I picked up one of those plug in energy monitors last week and put it on the fridge freezer last night. It recorded a little under 0.3kWh in 8 hrs so that equates to around 330kWh a year which is about £50 a year which is not to bad at under 15p a day. I appreciate it might be a little higher in the summer when its warmer but lucky our house seems to stay cool all year even on the hottest days of summer the downstairs of the house remains around 19-20C.
Just out of interest we are paying 25p/day electric standing charge and 15.3p/kWh day and 10.8p/kWh E7 night. gas standing charge 18.7p/day and 3.5p/kwh, does this seem about right or am i being over charged by my supplier? I will do a few checks tonight when the E7 night rate starts and see whats running to push up the night units as the national average if you have electric heating/water is 42% and ours is around 37% which does seem high.

Jibber123

I've also looked up the PIR sensors for the outside lights they say they use 0.3w on standby and 1w when switching. So if they were on standby for 23hrs a day and on for 1hr, all 5 of them would only use £2.50 a year. The outside lights are all LED 3 small ones are 30W LED's and the 2 large ones are 300W each. I will turn the MCB off that feeds them in the fuse board one night to check if they are coming on and off all night long and using a lot of electricity. I know we get a fair bit of wildlife in the garden as were quite remote, but the PIR's were setup pointing quite high so as not to get tripped by our own animals.

Jibber123

Quick update, i went into the meter cupboard last night at about midnight to try and get to the bottom of what was running at night. Wheni checked the timer clock for the nighttime E7 supply it appears to be 12 hours out it was showing just before 1300 hours at about 00:45 the morning. We did have an issue flagged up with this time-clock when we 1st moved in and someone came out from SSE to change the time, and i assumed all was fine. I've just got of the phone to someone at SSE and they said it's very unlikely that the time clock was 12 hours out they accused me of miss reading it. I'm sure it's wrong as the meter is flashing rate 2 from about 12:30am-7:30am which is the normal rate and also rate 2 is increasing during the night I read the meter at 1am, 3am and 5am.

Gerry1

Rate 1 and Rate 2 don't necessarily mean Night and Day, they can be the other way around. You need to look at the bills to see which applies in your case.

Jibber123

I know Rate 1 is night, Economy 7, or low rate, and rate 2 is day or high, i thought this was back to front when we first moved in but I've carefully checked it and it's defiantly the right way around. Rate 1 only changes for 7 hours a day i.e. Economy 7 low rate and rate 2 changes for the other 17 hours a day so must be the normal rate or full price. It seems our high usage of E7 could be down to the cooker being on for longer periods in the afternoon and early evening, as my wife normally cooks dinner then.