Huge Electricity Usage

slj432

Can anyone help me...i live in 1 bed flat that is around 985sqft (its is double height in all rooms). Its just me, so i live alone yet my electricity use is 8200kwh per year according to my supplier. I'm a 35 yr old and work from home maybe 3 days per week with a normal laptop. I have an electric car which i plug in once a week on average and it uses roughly 50-60kwh per charge (it tells me after each charge). I don't have anything unusual that plug in, i have LED light bulbs and only really use lamps not ceiling lights anyway, i only use 1 TV at a time (they're all new-ish)  with a sky Q box (no gaming etc). My heating is gas (its also high but i expect that with the room height) and my boiler is only 2 years old with hot water coming on for a hour in the morning + 1 hr at night....clearly with energy prices as they are, my electricity bills are extortionate - over £2000 a year with the cheapest supplier - for 4 weeks of December my electricity bill is £145 and i'm currently on a very cheap deal thats about to end - i was also away for the whole christmas week! I'm going to test the metre by turning everything off and checking if it still runs but if it doesn't, i really dont know what im supposed to do or how on earth im supposed to find out why my usage is equivalent to a detached family home with 4 people in it! Needless to say with prices the way they are and usage so high, its also becoming affordable. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. 

Chris_English

The car alone’s over 3,000 kWh per year, which is a decent fraction of your total usage. That leaves 5,000kWh per year for everything else, which is high, but not completely crazy for what’s quite a large flat.

Robin9

Electric shower ?

Cooking?

QrizB

slj432 said:

Can anyone help me...i live in 1 bed flat that is around 985sqft (its is double height in all rooms).

That is quite a large flat; my 3-bed semi is only 1000 sq.ft.

my electricity use is 8200kwh per year according to my supplier ... my electricity bills are extortionate - over £2000 a year

24p/kWh is a little bit steep but not crazy money in the current market. Can you give details of your current "cheap deal"?

victor2

slj432 said:

Can anyone help me...i live in 1 bed flat that is around 985sqft (its is double height in all rooms). Its just me, so i live alone yet my electricity use is 8200kwh per year according to my supplier. ....

How accurate is that figure though? Look at your electricity meter readings, preferably close to a year apart and the difference is how many kWh you used in that period. How long have you had the electric car? Look at meter readings over the time you've owned that and extrapolate them out to a year. If you haven't got any electric heating (including an immersion heater), then the average use doesn't vary that much over the year. Modern LED lights take so little energy that they don't add up to anything significant, given your annual estimate.

If the 8,200Kwh per annum still looks realistic, then take meter readings daily, at the same time each day, and note what you did (charged car, used tumble drier etc.) each day. Might give you an idea what is using the electricity.

bagand96

Immersion heater on the water tank accidentally left on 24/7?

I'll tag forum user @Gerry1 hopefully he will be along and leave you a link to his Meter Sanity Test!

slj432

Thanks, i don't have an electric shower and my oven is gas so even factoring in the car charging its incredibly high use. I know its a big 1 bed flat but that doesn't really impact my electricity use since my heating runs on gas. Im literally at a loss. 

The figure is accurate, I've been providing monthly readings to my electricity company and know what it was this time last year so it is based on actual use but clearly im going to have to start doing it daily and factoring in what i use. I have a dishwasher that goes on once per day (on a quick cycle) and a washing machine but i feel those things are all standard and compared to average electricity use for a 1 bed flat with 1 person living in it, my usage is extortionate. I spoke to somebody today who lives in 6,000sq house with 4 people and they use 12,000kwh per year so it makes my 8,000 seem insane! 

victor2

Is the meter inside your flat? If not, is it actually the meter to your flat? Easy to check - switch off the supply and see if everything in your flat goes off and the meter stops. If an outside meter, it might be feeding something else as well. You can do a sanity check on that as well.

Ant555

Ref the dishwasher on every day - do you know the model/rating of the appliance as this may be contributing in part.

There are three of us at home right now and we definitely dont use enough pots to fill our dishwasher up every single day - annual usage around 4500 total for elec which, although not excessive,  ive just started trying to identify how its made up in anticipation of a future increase in the unit charges.

Chris_English

The next step is to work our what’s using it.

An immersion heater left on us a common issue, but whatever it is, the process is the same.

Turn everything off, and check that your meter stops measuring any use.

Then turn things on one at a time, and measure the usage of each.

That’s pretty much it, that’ll show you where it’s going.

Petriix

You need to check the accuracy of the 8200kWh figure because that seems excessive. We have an EV and 4 people in our 3 bed terrace and consume under 5000kWh per year.

You're likely in a position to benefit from switching to Octopus Go and get cheap (7.5p per kWh) electricity for 4 hours overnight. If your daytime usage really is that high then investing in a home battery (to store that cheap off-peak electricity) would likely be a good investment.

You definitely need to do some investigation into why your usage is so high.