£700 a month electricity bill now im on the price cap

mark19851234

Hi

Thanks in advance for any advice you maybe able to give. Our electricity bills have always been high but now we are on the price cap it is getting stupidly expensive and only going to get worse in April when the price cap rises. I just wanted your opinion on whether our electricity usage is expected based on our property:

We have no gas in the property at all. Everything is powered by electricity.
 
3 bedroom grade 2 listed cottage. Not great insulation due to its age but we dont use any electricity for heating in the house (we use log burner mainly).
We have a 1 bedroom annex we rent out on Air BNB with a hot tub. The property has 2 electric radiators which are used by the guests. These are on most of the time but the annex is a new build and very well insulated. I appreciate the hot tub may not be helping but it is a very well insulated unit and I feel at most it is responsible for £100-£150 of our cost.

We are spending about another £300 a month on wood and butane gas canisters.
This puts our energy costs during the winter at around £1000 a month total!!

Does this seem normal?

Best Regards
Mark

brewerdave

Haven't you got a separate meter for the rental ?? I would suspect VERY strongly that the majority of your leccy bill is due to the rental - a hot tub and wall panel heaters ?  More likely £600 pm !!!

Sea_Shell

brewerdave said:

Haven't you got a separate meter for the rental ?? I would suspect VERY strongly that the majority of your leccy bill is due to the rental - a hot tub and wall panel heaters ?  More likely £600 pm !!!

As far as guest are concerned, the price they pay includes "all you can eat" energy.   So they aren't going to worried about turning up the heating, or turning lights off etc. like they might in their own home.

Will it still be a viable business if you can't increase your rental fees to cover increased costs.

daveyjp

Friends with a holiday cottage charge extra for hot tub use.

 With electric costs how they are you should do the same.

savers_united

Best way is to look at it spread over the year, £700pm is that £8400 annually or is it more like £700pm in winter months and say £350pm during the warmer months.

I agree with others that it's the rental, panel heaters and a hot tub ain't going to be cheap to run especially this time of year on a free for all. 

My understanding from people who own Hot Tubs is that it's best to keep them heated rather than blast them from cold when you need to use them, so I doubt it would make much difference to costs switching it off instead of keeping it on low heat if its being used on a regular basis, but maybe limit its use so that the cover is not removed for long periods.

It may be worth connecting a meter to the rental just to see how much its using, do you have electric showers, Oven? How is the water heated? you may even have a few guests here and there charging their EVs. 

QrizB

£700 will buy you almost 3500kWh of electricity. That's more than I'd expect a "3 bed cottage" to use in a year without electric heating.

Could you share your recent meter readings, please?

I agree with brewerdave that you should have a separate meter for the AirBnB so you know how much your business is costing you.

Vegastare

I think you do need to address the holiday let, clearly it is a drain cost wise, maybe a cost for Hot tub use, we paid £50 etc for the use once for a week, so clearly 2 -3 years back it was an added expense to the renter.

Plus there is thought of we paid for or stay so we'll use everything....where possibly in there own home they think twice.

FreeBear

QrizB said: I agree with brewerdave that you should have a separate meter for the AirBnB so you know how much your business is costing you.

Better still, have some energy monitors (in addition to the separate meter), so that you can see where all that electricity is going.

If you pick the right monitors, you can record the data on a computer and build up a picture of when usage peaks.

jimjames

Vegastare said:

Plus there is thought of we paid for or stay so we'll use everything....where possibly in there own home they think twice.

Absolutely. Probably heaters on full and windows open to cool it down if they get too warm

lohr500

As suggested above, please could you share some actual meter reading history and your latest rate per kWh.
Your cost sounds incredibly high for the set up you have described, especially if you aren't using any electricity to heat the main property.

However, what power rating is each of the electric heaters in the annex and how many days p.a. are you renting out on AirBnB?
If they were both 3kW and guests left them on maximum 24/7 with windows open, etc, then they could theoretically be using 144kW a day if their thermostats never reached switch off temperature.

markin

Change to a wood fired hot tub, and charge for the bundle of wood