HELP!! £400 pcm Electricity!

Reed_Richards

Is the property detached?  Your electrician will most likely have at least one device that can trace live wires if they are not buried too deep within the fabric of the building so they might be able to trace the circuit that powers the storage heaters and see if it goes off somewhere else as well.  

ann_droid

Hi
No one seems to have picked up on the unbalanced load.
Ask the electrician about unbalanced load and the possible charges for that.
Is the electricity bill showing any kind of adjustment for unbalanced load?
An edited photo of a typical bill may give some clues.

Robin9

ann_droid said:

.....
Is the electricity bill showing any kind of adjustment for unbalanced load?

I've got  a 3 ph supply and meter for a commercial supply and the bills are just like the normal domestic supply.  Very few 3 ph supplies are truly balanced - mine has 5  different sub distribution boards, no 3 phase equipment at all.  The metering is rather like OP with simple registers. 

Gerry1

Reed_Richards said:

Is the property detached?

In the first post the OP says that it's a 3 bed linked detached house and subsequently says it was once a Police House.

Reed_Richards

Gerry1 said:

Reed_Richards said:

Is the property detached?

In the first post the OP says that it's a 3 bed linked detached house and subsequently says it was once a Police House.

So "linked detached" means a house attached to garage which is attached to another house?  In which case you could potentially have cables running from one house to the next through the garage.  

Gerry1

Reed_Richards said:

Gerry1 said:

Reed_Richards said:

Is the property detached?

In the first post the OP says that it's a 3 bed linked detached house and subsequently says it was once a Police House.

So "linked detached" means a house attached to garage which is attached to another house?  In which case you could potentially have cables running from one house to the next through the garage.  

Or the bunker underneath !

[Deleted User]

ann_droid said:

Hi
No one seems to have picked up on the unbalanced load.
Ask the electrician about unbalanced load and the possible charges for that.
Is the electricity bill showing any kind of adjustment for unbalanced load?
An edited photo of a typical bill may give some clues.

Unbalanced loads only applies to large scale industrial consumers drawing significantly (eg Megawatts) more power on one phase to the extent it is noticeable at the power station(s). These consumers are usually charged on a different basis to domestic consumers.

A domestic / small business consumer connected to 3 phase drawing unbalanced power would never be noticeable to the grid and is of no relevance - each house on the whole street / locality fed from the local substation is on one of the 3 phases - each drawing a different amount from each phase, but on average the draw will be roughly the same across a large number of consumers making no material difference.

This meter the OP uses (MT300) aggregates the energy consumed across the 3 phases and doesn't care about imbalance or power factor as you mentioned in an early post:

ann_droid said:

Hi

Things I believe I know.....

A 3 phase supply is for BALANCED usage, IE the same amount over all 3 lines, with the neutral just coping with any im-balance.

So if only 1 phase is loaded, and I think there may a button to scroll thru the meter readings, you may get a multiplier on the bill for poor power factor correction (PF / PFc);  (That's how it used to be).

Power factor has nothing to do with the imbalance of phases, it is to do with reactive loads where the current flow isn't in sync with the voltage. As you know, the OP has described their appliances and the biggest drawing appliances are all resistive with a power factor of 1.0 (heaters etc) so it wouldn't even be an issue even if the OP was billed on an industrial electricity contract that takes into account power factor.