Moved from flat to house and my energy bills have tripled?! How can I be using so much more?

matelodave

As others have said, only heat your water once a day, say for 1-2 hours just before your morning ablutions and see if you've got enough left by the time you go to bed - we get away with just over an hour once a day. Reduce the volume of hot water you use by spending less time in the shower and possibly taking fewer of them.
Dont let it run down the sink and rinse stuff (including your hands) in cold water rather than hot ( a lot of heated water gets wasted sitting in the pipes if you keep running the hot tap to get the hot water flowing)

Check stuff like lighting, have you now got lots of downlighters, if so change them to LEDs, do the same with the lights you use the most and turn them off when not being used. Make sure that your immersion heater is switched off.

Try logging your meter readings every day for a couple of weeks and switch stuff on & off to see what is using it. Check your heating controls to ensure that you are only heating when you need it and that the temperatures are set to suit you. It will take a bit of learning especially if the controls are a lot different from what you were used to.

Don't forget that you are heating at least twice the area of your flat and you've now got a loft above you. If your flat was in the middle of a block then you may have had fewer outside walls, no ground floor and no loft above you - all of which lose more heat and will make a difference to your heating requirements.

Get yourself onto a decent gas and electric tariff and don't forget you don't have to get them both from the same supplier. Read the meters yourself, don't rely on the data being sent to your supplier and make sure you check your bills/statements at least every month.

My monthly energy consumption in October/November, February and March is around three times my summer consumption and it increases to four or five times in December and January.

Gerry1

Cardew wrote: »

With respect there is no ambiguity in the OP's post, and no confusion in the replies given by other posters.

Similarly with gas the OP is comparing like with like.

Not necessarily. What are the gas 'units': hundreds of cubic feet, cubic metres or kWh? :huh:

If a metric gas meter is mistakenly thought to be an imperial one, usage of £1000 (excl. standing charges) will jump to £2831.70 !

It's always safer to compare kWh with kWh.

gozaimasu

It's definitely the hot water tank.

I moved from a combi boiler to one of these tanks (heated twice a day) and my bills went through the roof. Turned the hot water off, and now I only turn it on when I need to use hot water. Within 15 mins I have plenty of hot water for a shower.

My bills have gone back to normal now.

Cardew

gozaimasu wrote: »

It's definitely the hot water tank.

I moved from a combi boiler to one of these tanks (heated twice a day) and my bills went through the roof. Turned the hot water off, and now I only turn it on when I need to use hot water. Within 15 mins I have plenty of hot water for a shower.

My bills have gone back to normal now.

This has been discussed many times on MSE and IMO the cause of high bills is not the HW water tank - assuming your tank has proper foam insulation.

Tanks for the last xx years or so have their heat loss stamped somewhere on the outer covering. This is measured to a British Standard with the water at 65C which is above the temperature most people keep their Domestic hot water. A typical heat loss is between 1kWh to 2kWh in 24 hours - depending on size of tank.

My Gledhill 180 litre tank loses heat at a rate of 54watts; so it requires 1.296kWh a day to replace the lost heat if I keep the water at 65C - so a cost of just under 4p. In many cases that heat is not lost as the 'lost heat' warms the fabric of the house; which is why they are often kept in an airing cupboard.

I have read reports that say generally a conventional HW system is cheaper to run than a combi. However it is not possible to do direct comparisons as there are so many unknown factors - pipe runs, frequency of demanding hot water etc.

There is also the cost of water. With many combis it is necessary to run off a few litres of cold water before the HW arrives at the tap. To overcome this disadvantage many manufacturers of combis have a small internal tank that can be kept heated.

RelievedSheff

When we had the conventional boiler and water tank we still had to run a few litres of water off to get hot water at the taps so no difference there really.

Cardew

RelievedSheff wrote: »

When we had the conventional boiler and water tank we still had to run a few litres of water off to get hot water at the taps so no difference there really.

We all will have some wasted water before the hot water arrives. However with a tank the water is at the required temperature. With a combi it takes a few seconds for the boiler to heat the water.

So with equal length pipe runs, it will undoubtedly take longer with a combi to get hot water to the tap. As said earlier, to overcome that disadvantage many manufacturers of combis have a small internal tank that can be kept heated.

Uxb1

Generally in a house where lots of hot water might/is/may be required at several outlets at once then a standard old-fashioned hot water tank is best.
The amount of time the water takes to get hot depends primarily of the length of the pipe run from the combi/or hot water tank to the tap outlet. As well has pushing out the cold water in them on longer runs the pipes themselves need heating up before the water ends up at the outlet actually hot.

...and off topic, but hotels have endless circulation systems so the hot water is constantly being pumped circulated round a loop from the tank and back to it, and the loop passes each room.
So when you open the tap in your hotel the amount of cold water needing to pass out of the pipes before it becomes hot is only a few meters back to the 'live loop' and not all the way back to the tank at the other end of the hotel.

Personally i have a hot water tank which I have put and extra layer of loft type insulation around it top to bottom and also on top of it.
It is heated once a day in the early morning.

jk0

Flats often have someone above & below and often someone on either side, so you only have a small front & back wall that loses heat.


Terraced houses are slightly worse, semis worse still, and detached houses are awful. (Ask me how I know.)

gozaimasu

Cardew wrote: »

This has been discussed many times on MSE and IMO the cause of high bills is not the HW water tank - assuming your tank has proper foam insulation.

Interesting. My bills went down after I switched off the hot water tank. I didn't do anything else differently to reduce the energy consumption. What do you think it is, if you're disagreeing with what I say it is?

RelievedSheff

jk0 wrote: »

Flats often have someone above & below and often someone on either side, so you only have a small front & back wall that loses heat.


Terraced houses are slightly worse, semis worse still, and detached houses are awful. (Ask me how I know.)

It very much depends on the house. Our current detached house loses far less heat then our previous semi detached did. It is down to the construction of the property not necessarily whether it is attached or not.