Crazy Energy Bill

savers_united

We are using a similar amount of leccy but that inc charging an EV a few times a week overnight. So in theory and to put it in some kind of perspective with that kind of usage you could be running an EV for 10k miles a year and saving yourself a fortune on fuel costs.

But if you are WFH I guess you are able to offset any commuting costs from your energy bills. 

QrizB

Happy_Sloth said:

Here's snips from my bills.

Thank you for the bill info. You are a large user of energy, which probably isn't a surprise. The average household uses less electricity in a complete year than you did over those five warmer months. Your gas bill for the period is less exceptional but you've still used three times what I would expect, assuming your heating was off for most of that period.

From 20th April to 22nd September (156 days) you used:

• 3728kWh of electricity (24kWh/day)
  
• 4906kWh of gas (31kWh/day)
  

For comparison, if the heating was off most people would be using less than 8kWh of electricity and less than 15kWh of gas per day.

Your bill and tariff looks like EDF, which means you're probably only being billed every 6 months or so.

As someone else asked, could you read your meters today and tell us the readings? We can see how much you've used since September.

Electricity is 5x the price of gas so that's where you really need to look to see where it's going. You should be able to tell if it's the PCs using your energy monitor (the one you used on your freezers in October); if it's really those, it could even be cheaper to buy a couple of laptops for WFH rather than pay for the electricity they're burning (laptops use as much power as a lightbulb).

But I'm wondering if it's something else. Do you have any electric heaters anywhere, even "low power" or "anti-frost" ones? Any dehumidifiers?

theoretica

You have a boiler and hot water tank - does it have an immersion heater for emergency back up and is it absolutely definitely off?  Does your distribution board have any circuit labels that are not expected?

I think in your situation I would start by listing every single electrical thing in the house that is used once a week or more - from lightbulbs to the oven and routers - and see if their energy estimate actually adds up to what you are using.

Happy_Sloth

molerat said:

Electric shower ?

Electric cooking range ?

Fish tank / vivarium ?

Electric Shower,  Electric Oven, Gas Hob,  no fish tanks etc. 

Dishwasher, Washing Machine etc.. 

Happy_Sloth

MattMattMattUK said:

Happy_Sloth said:

MattMattMattUK said:

brook_heather said:

Happy_Sloth said:

• Computers -  3 PC's (My husbands in particular is eating electric) with 2 people working from home on big over powered gaming PC's and my husband using his for most of the day while he's unwell. But with WFH we have no choice, the 3 PC's are on for most of the day, my son uses his all day for work, they play's games in the evening.  This seems to be 99% of where the electric go's, honestly i was surprised by this... i didn't think they ate as much as they do.. my alone husbands seems to cost about £2 a day to run on it's own which is staggering! that's £60 of the bill on it's own. 

Please post the idle power consumption of the PCs - I have a gaming PC (i5 9500/GTX1060/16GB/SSD+HDD) and it uses 40W at idle which would cost about 20p for 24 hours - when gaming it will use 160W.  Make sure each PC has the balanced power plan selected rather than high performance as that will run the cpu at maximum speed all of the time.  To cost £2 a day the PC would have to be using 400W all the time and be turned on for 24 hours a day?

It really depends on the PC, my GPU can draw more than 400W (RTX 3090), when you factor in the other components (i9 12700k, 64GB, M.2 x2, SATA SSD x2, monitor (48W), it can be easy to get high power usage during gaming/editing, yes idle can drop down considerably, but if I was not working and gaming for 8 hours a day I would be able to hit £2 per day. 

its more like 12 hours a day atm  

Work or gaming? If it is work then fair enough, if your husband is spending 12 hours a day gaming, whilst claiming he cannot work I think he needs a foot up his behind!

He's had a rough time with employment plus several deaths in the family. Physically he's fine, mentally he's genuinely not fit to work. he did get a job before Christmas it lasted 2 weeks... 

Happy_Sloth

savers_united said:

We are using a similar amount of leccy but that inc charging an EV a few times a week overnight. So in theory and to put it in some kind of perspective with that kind of usage you could be running an EV for 10k miles a year and saving yourself a fortune on fuel costs.

But if you are WFH I guess you are able to offset any commuting costs from your energy bills. 

yes 2 people WFH .. i am able to claim about £4 a week for WFH expenses but that genuinely doesn't cover the extra electric.  I am saving about £60 a month in petrol so i don't mind some of the addition expense as you say it does offset a little. 

Gerry1

Switch off all lights, immersion heaters and any hard wired items then physically remove all plugs from the sockets.  Look at the red light marked '1000 imp/kWh' (or similar) on the meter on the wall.  Watch it like a hawk for at least five minutes and make sure it never flashes once.  If it does, you have an unexplained item drawing power that needs to be investigated, e.g. tubular heater in the loft or anti-frost heating tape around the pipes.

Also do the Meter Sanity Test.

SuperHung

Does your husband know that his PC is costing £2 a day for electricity?

Gerry1

Happy_Sloth said:

molerat said:

Electric shower ?

Electric cooking range ?

Fish tank / vivarium ?

Electric Shower,  Electric Oven, Gas Hob,  no fish tanks etc. 

Two BIG suspects...

Happy_Sloth

QrizB said:

Your bill and tariff looks like EDF, which means you're probably only being billed every 6 months or so.

As someone else asked, could you read your meters today and tell us the readings? We can see how much you've used since September.

Yes it's EDF

Ok todays Readings... 

• Electric 34572 KWH  -- ( +2,853 since last reading,110 days,25 KWH per day so about the same)  
  
• Gas 11575 -- (+ 1,036 since last reading, they do some calc on it... i think that means about 11,683 KWH)

So that's looking like.. so far this period 

2,853 x 21p = £599 electric  (£5.40p per day, £162 per month)
11,683 x 4p = £467.32 gas  (£4.24p per day, £127 per month)

So yeah my £300 ish per month during the winter doens't seem to far off.