£4500 gas bill £2000 electric at new rental property!

goldie2506

MWT said:

goldie2506 said:

The gas is 3.78p per kwh and 29.8p a day standing charge  

Depending on which part of the country you are in that is very expensive but 'only' about 50-75% more expensive than it should be so not accounting for the whole of your gas cost problem.

Are you currently taking daily meter readings?

By this week you should be using gas only for water heating I would have thought, or are you still using heating in the house?

How have you got the water heating set up? ... do you have it on constantly and controlled by a cylinder thermostat or are you having it come on for a few hours in the morning and evening?

The interest here is to see if the daily metered usage makes sense in terms of what should be quite minimum consumption.

For example we will typically consume less than 11kWh of gas a day just for hot water so 1 cubic metre or less, but in winter that might go up to 7 cubic metres or so when the heating is on (5 bed property, good insulation and double glazing).

I have reduced it now to a tarrif of 27p day standing and 3.36 per unit for two years....

Gerry1

goldie2506 said:

I have reduced it now to a tarrif of 27p day standing and 3.36 per unit for two years....

Obviously you have LOTS of money to burn !

BTW, I have some nice crisp £10 notes I can sell you, only £15 each.

JJ_Egan

Still well over the odds .

goldie2506

Gerry1 said:

That gas tariff is daylight robbery; for comparison I'm paying 2.370p per kWh, 17.29p per day. You still haven't told us the name of the company, nor the exact tariff.  I wonder whether the landlord gets a commission?

You could be misreading the meter(s), that's why photos would help.

Its SSe for gas and british gas for electric sse 2 year fix v2 for gas. I dont have the electric tarrif details to hand. My nieghnours (theres only a few properties occupied in the development of 11 homes) have a smaller place and thier first gas bill was £3000

Talldave

You need to switch again now! You're being robbed blind. I'm with Gulf and very happy. Any exit fee will fade into insignificance against savings you will make.
But what about meter readings - can you give us some? Is your meter being treated as imperial when it's metric. Does the meter spin when the boiler's off? I'm not sure how you're managing to consume so much gas. We spent a year in a single glazed fridge and the boiler ran almost 24/7 in winter and consumption was 54,000kWhr for the year. 

brewerdave

Basic stuff. Have you checked whether your gas meter is metric (reads in m3) or Imperial (reads in 100s cu ft)? Whichever it is ,are the correct units shown on the bill? One unit on an Imperial meter is 2.83X the number of kwh on a metric meter. 
Secondly ,have you checked that when everything in your flat running off gas is actually OFF (ie boiler ,gas fire ?, cooker, hob) that there is no flow indicated on your meter ??
As to electricity consumption. Is the underfloor heating powered by leccy? If so ,you need to shut it down urgently. I have a small area heated with electric underfloor mats (conservatory) .I can only switch it on over Xmas and New Year as I estimate it costs me the equivalent of £ 80 pm which is more than the rest of my 5 bedroom house!!

Robin9

Your gas meter should read like 01234.567   (look for the decimal point !) and the reading you should be giving your supplier is 01234

As you are the first occupier the reading in November should be a little above 00000 ( the builder will have used a bit in commissioning the boiler)  What does your first invoice say ?   I assume you read your meter when you moved in and gave readings to the builders supplier and then switched supplier - didn't you ?

matelodave

There are a lot of random guesses here, so lets start from the beginning
Did you read your meters yourself when you moved in, did you open an account yourself with the supplier who was already supplying the property (both gas and electric).I'm guessing that you haven't been sending monthly readings to the suppliers nor checking your bills otherwsie you would have noticed that you were getting silly bills some time ago. Have you still got records of those aoriginal readings.

It's really quite difficult to understand what sort of heating you've got. Does the gas boiler heat hot water, feed the radiators and does it do the underfloor heating as well (via hot water pipes) or is you u/f electric. What does the a/c do, where are the outlets and what does the unit look like outside. Have you got a hot water tank. Have a look at all the heating units and read the make and model numbers and let us know so we can try an fathom out what you've really got

If you are on a two year contract then that probably not an "evergreen" tariff and I'm sure that you could get better tariffs with other suppliers.Please tell us what the tariff names are but as others have said, they seem to be quite expensive

Unless you read your meters regularly you really dont know what's using it all or when it's being used. .

Unfortunately if you leave it for months and accept estimated bills it can take ages to work out what has been going on so you need a methodical approach. Start by reading your meter YOURSELF, every morning (or evening) and recording the readings and check that it really is your meter that you are reading, that it really is your bill for that meter 9cehck the serial numbers) and lastly that when you turn everything off that your meter stop incrementing, just in case you are paying for someone else's energy as well as yours (these are common problems in converted properties)

macman

As pointed out earlier, your estimated usage is completely erroneous, as you have taken November to April and doubled it to pro-rata. All winter months with the heating on...
You can expect to use up to 80% of your annual heating cost in the coldest 3 months, and heating is maybe 75% of your total usage.