Electericity bill

azad

Hi I am renting a 2 bed 2 bath flat that has electric boiler for heating and hotwater 12kw.Tenant is complaining the bill is high since October (avg 150, 4, 5 hours per day ). I booked a boiler engineer , he checked the boiler and said everything is fine, and because they pay 17p per kw than it is much more expensive than gas boiler.  Now Tanent is calling me to change the boiler to 6 kw, we can't have gas boiler in the flat.I already paid £1000 for maintenance of the boiler since I bought the flat 5  as it has some issue although it was new. If anyone has an electric boiler.how much is your bill in the winter ? How many hours you use hotwater and heating? 
Thanks

Gerry1

17p/kWh is expensive, but an electric boiler with wet radiators is the most catastrophically expensive form of heating it's possible to have, so it's hardly surprising that your tenants are complaining.

Sounds like you've been ripped off on maintenance; there shouldn't be much to go wrong with an electric boiler if the system was installed correctly.

If it's really impossible to have gas then scrap the boiler and install night storage heaters and a hot tank with an immersion heater, perhaps with panel heaters in the bedrooms.  Otherwise you'll just have a succession of unhappy tenants that keep moving out.

Robin9

The tenant could save a lot by changing suppliers - he/she can certainly better 17p . Time to hit the comparison sites - it will certainly be worth changing even if there is an exit penalty.

rp1974

Perhaps might be worthwhile checking how much running costs are to provide any prospective future tenants with the information beforehand.
The cost of energys one of the last things that people seem to consider before moving into a property,soon becomes the top.
I have been in exactly the situation your tenant is in,as in I was the tenant,think it's a bit of a cheek really on their part.
We would all like cheaper energy bills,particularly if someone else is paying for the installation,I'd like solar panels,a heat pump and battery storage,wouldnt embarrass myself expecting my landlord to provide it though.
As there's no gas I can only see replacing an electric boiler with another being entirely pointless.
It's always going to be an issue realistically unless following the advice of Gerry1 as above for example.
My solution,as is your tenants was to move.

matelodave

Putting a 6kw boiler wont improve his energy bills all that much, in fact it could well increase them because it will probably never ever get the place up to temperature so the thermostats wont control the temperature. He'll then end up using a secondary heater of some sort.

As others have said above, 17p/kwh is quite expensive, I pay 12.25p and there are deals around where it's 14p or less.

dogshome

Seems the Tenant doesn't understand how it works.

A 6Kw boiler will just take longer to bring a given volume of water up to a required temperature - It's up to the tenant to experiment with just how long the 9Kw boiler has to be on for the amount of Hot Water he wants - True that the boilers thermostat will cut off when the temperature is X, but he could adjust it to a temperature of Z