Huge rise in energy since move

matelodave

"Me and my partner moved from a small two bed house into another small two bed house and have since seen our bills nearly double between the properties that we cannot get to the bottom of. Our energy consumption has been pretty much like for like - so I am wondering if there could be a significant difference between the two houses causing this."

Is what you said in your opening paragraph, but you dont actually know that unless you have got meter readings and actual consumption figures for both properties. Unfortunately most people tend to use a lot more than they think they do because they don't monitor it, they just panic when a ginormous bill comes in and wonder why.

If you read yours meter, snd in the info and check your bills every month then you really will know how much you use, month on month and will be able to determine what uses it and when and even more importantly what happens when you do do soemthing about trying to reduce your consumption.

Being at home a bit more (either you or your partner) does tend to have the effect of using more energy, either with heating, cooking, watching the telly, computing and myriad of other things that are usually switched off all day. Even luxuriating in long hot showers because you've got more time makes it all add up.

Start keeping your own spreadsheet and try monitoring your meters at least weekly to see whats is going on and what you can do to minimise your consumption - you might be surprised. Most of all look at the number of kwh that you are using because that's actually your consumption, the bills are what you pay for it, so reduce your consumption and the bills will reduce as well. 

I dont know the price of gas coz we dont use it but your !4.408p/kwh is 2.4p/kwh more than I pay- that's costing you £55 more for what you've used so far so it shouldn't be difficult to find tariffs that could save you more than £100 a year. Cuple that with some energy saving (tweaking thermostats and timers) wearing jumpers, using less hot water etc and you could be £200 a year better off - but you have to work at it and not just wait for the bill and then panic.

Gerry1

Remember to ignore all claimed savings and projections, sadly the CA and Which? sites are guilty of this, as are most others.

Just compare annual costs based on your actual meter readings.  You could try the CEC and others to see whether cashback is available, but it's unlikely if the quotations are any good.

Nooglienoo

matelodave said:

"Me and my partner moved from a small two bed house into another small two bed house and have since seen our bills nearly double between the properties that we cannot get to the bottom of. Our energy consumption has been pretty much like for like - so I am wondering if there could be a significant difference between the two houses causing this."

Is what you said in your opening paragraph, but you dont actually know that unless you have got meter readings and actual consumption figures for both properties. Unfortunately most people tend to use a lot more than they think they do because they don't monitor it, they just panic when a ginormous bill comes in and wonder why.

If you read yours meter, snd in the info and check your bills every month then you really will know how much you use, month on month and will be able to determine what uses it and when and even more importantly what happens when you do do soemthing about trying to reduce your consumption.

Being at home a bit more (either you or your partner) does tend to have the effect of using more energy, either with heating, cooking, watching the telly, computing and myriad of other things that are usually switched off all day. Even luxuriating in long hot showers because you've got more time makes it all add up.

Start keeping your own spreadsheet and try monitoring your meters at least weekly to see whats is going on and what you can do to minimise your consumption - you might be surprised. Most of all look at the number of kwh that you are using because that's actually your consumption, the bills are what you pay for it, so reduce your consumption and the bills will reduce as well. 

I dont know the price of gas coz we dont use it but your !4.408p/kwh is 2.4p/kwh more than I pay- that's costing you £55 more for what you've used so far so it shouldn't be difficult to find tariffs that could save you more than £100 a year. Cuple that with some energy saving (tweaking thermostats and timers) wearing jumpers, using less hot water etc and you could be £200 a year better off - but you have to work at it and not just wait for the bill and then panic.

Thanks for the feedback! I was much more on top of meter readings in the old house (every fortnight for the most part) but in this new house the meters are a little more awkward to access so I'm finding I forget and put it off a little more. But I'm going to do daily meter readings for the next few weeks with photos and I think I'll definitely track them in a spreadsheet - great idea. I'm also going to try one day on and one day off with the hot water boiler to see if I can hopefully reduce its impact on my bills.

Weird part is I've just checked my British Gas account again, I submitted a meter reading at about 6pm today and at about 11pm tonight I've gone from £181 debit to £49 credit. No bill has been generated yet so will be interesting to see how that breaks it down. Starting to wonder if I've either submitted a reading incorrectly today or previously as this doesn't seem right at all...

dogshome

18,945 Kwh of gas used over 243 days in a small house is HUGE

It is a Metric meter so check it's being billed as such  -  On the bill divide the number of Kwh charged by the meter units used, the answer should be around 11.2 - If it's around 31.5 you are being billed for an Imperial meter and seriously overcharged, so get onto BG

Talldave

Your electricity consumption seems ok but gas use is a bit high. For electricity the potential savings come from the big consumers that are on 24/7 - fridge and freezer, followed by lighting (halogen being the most evil), along with actually switching off computers and monitors when not in use. 
Now is the time of year to work out your hot water gas consumption - is the tank stat a bit high, perhaps? I've not measured ours accurately in our current house but guess it's about 15-20kWh a day for a 300L tank, set for 2 hours in morning and about 8 hours afternoon/evening. Of course it's only actually on for a few minutes at a time topping up the very well insulated tank.
Heating - you need to look at the thermostat and TRV setup. Is the boiler running unnecessarily, "fighting" a TRV? 

MWT

If it helps, our hot water usage of gas runs at roughly 1 m³ / day, so say 11.2kWh. That is for a 100L tank set to run between 6:30am-11pm. Reducing the hours makes very little difference to the consumption in our case.

We have two fridge/freezers, each consumes 1kWh / day.

RelievedSheff

dogshome said:

18,945 Kwh of gas used over 243 days in a small house is HUGE

It is a Metric meter so check it's being billed as such  -  On the bill divide the number of Kwh charged by the meter units used, the answer should be around 11.2 - If it's around 31.5 you are being billed for an Imperial meter and seriously overcharged, so get onto BG

I was thinking the same, nearly 19000kWh is massive for a small two bed modern build.

As a comparison we used 6000kWh of gas last year and that is for a new build 3 bed detached, so only a third of what the OP has used for a smaller property.

matelodave

The problem with a "few minutes at a time" from your gas boiler sis that it really isn't very efficient as it goes into.full blast mode every time it restarts  You also need to take into account that all that lovely hot water gets pumped around between 5 and 10 metres of un-insulated pipework whilst it's being heated and you are powering the pump & combustion fan everytime as well. You would be much better off just trying to reheat the tank once or possibly twice a day, so the boiler can run for a longer period but much more efficiently. You could also add insulation to the flow and return pipework to reduce the heat losses

We only heat our 200litre tank once a day for just over an hour which give us all the hot water we need for the whole day and uses around 1.5kwh of leccy at this time of the year (using a heatpump  with a COP of around 3 at this time of the year)

Actually its pretty easy to work out how much heat you need to heat a quantity of water so you should e able to work out how much heat gets wasted compared to how much actually goes into the water. Pt = (4.2* × V × temp rise) ÷ 3600, 

To heat 100 litres of water from say 20 degrees to 60 degrees  becomes 4.2* x 100 x (60-20)/3600 = 4.6kwh

*4.2 is a multiplication factor to take into account the specific heat of water

Talldave

Maybe my "few minutes at a time" wording was confusing. I was trying to make clear that although I've programmed quite large time windows for hot water, the boiler heats the water up in a few minutes at the start of the time window and that's it provided we don't run a large bath.  The tank is a 300L UniStor so no worries with insulation. 
I thought we were in for a few weeks of hot water only gas use but the temperature drop has had the heating kick in a few times.

RelievedSheff

Talldave said:

Maybe my "few minutes at a time" wording was confusing. I was trying to make clear that although I've programmed quite large time windows for hot water, the boiler heats the water up in a few minutes at the start of the time window and that's it provided we don't run a large bath.  The tank is a 300L UniStor so no worries with insulation. 
I thought we were in for a few weeks of hot water only gas use but the temperature drop has had the heating kick in a few times.

When we had a water tank we used to heat it once a day for about an hour in the morning, that was enough to have hot water all day.

Can you not turn the boiler to hot water only at this time of year?

Although the temperature dropped a little it wasn't cold enough to warrant the heating being on surely? It can't have done much heating if it did briefly come on!