Weirdly high energy Bills- faulty meter?

SAC2334

Dommyb said:

QrizB said:

Another thought, sorry.

Dommyb said:

... to fix the time on the meter ...

It would be useful to know when your E7 times are. This might mean staying up late and checking the meter.

In the photo of your meter we can see it has five wires at the bottom. The two on the left are the "in" and the three on the right are the "out". On the "out" side there are two wires with red cable ties; one has a single cable tie, the other has two. Where do they go, can you see?

In your flat (or wherever the consumer units [fuse boxes] are), do you have one consumer unit or two? Can you post photos?

I think the times are 12am-7am a nigh time rates. HOWEVER, because time is wrong on the meter this is thrown off, its about 2 hrs behind so in reality our night rate is 2am-9am🙈

i will look at the wires when home. From the top of my heat its one unit BUT don’t take my word for it right now.

i ve been a meter reader for 20 years, now retired.  The  Ampy Eco 7 meter s timings are governed by the time on the meter, even if its miles out .These digital clocks do drift slowly out of time over the years. The day  rate will be normally be timed to come on at 07.30 am .to 12.30 am ( in my area ) and whatever time it actually is does nt matter as its controlled by the meter`s clock .Ampy meters can be hours wrong on the clock plus they stay the same when we switch to BST, so even if the clock is spot on in GMT its an hour out in BST.

 Analogue Eco 7 meters are a lot worse and the night and day timings can be 12 hours out with the night rate on at 3 pm in the afternoon. Scottish Power were the only supplier who had an interest in if the timings were accurate and asked us to tell them if they were more than 2 hrs adrift .The rest of the suppliers I read meters for were not concerned . Its up to the customer to understand their meters
When the timings are wrong it can be beneficial to the customer but only if they understand what times the day and night rates are on. 

Dommyb

Hey again all.
so in the last couple days our energy usage has been tons better, however there is now another issue- the hot water.
i thought id stay on this post instead of making a new one so people can follow from previous comments.

We still have the top switch on the immersion turned off that has more than halved our usage
The bottom switch’s LED does light up from around 2am to 9am. So we didnt set anything up on the central heating thingy the first night to see if this gives us hot water by itself, but it didn’t as water we used that day was lukewarm at best.

Last night i looked up how to set up the thermostat screen. And set it to run from 5am-8:30.
however this morning still no hot water…

Really dont know what we’re doing wrong with this, does this mean we NEED that top switch on?..

Dommyb

Just adding to previous comment- perhaps having it on from 5am-8:30 is not long enough?… but from what i read online even 2 hours at a time should give a full tank of hot water… if not id expect it to at least be warm, rather than basically cold as it was this morning

tim_p

Potentially faulty lower immersion.  When it comes on you should see the meter led flash much faster and if it doesn’t then the immersion or thermostat has likely failed. Hopefully it’ll be the stat as they are simple things to replace. Replacing the immersion involves draining system and risks damaging the tank itself. One of those being faulty would explain what you describe, as would the setting of the lower stat being set very low. Simple to check under the cover.

Gerry1

Whatever the problem is with the lower immersion heater the OP need not worry, it'll be up to the landlord to fix it, although it would be worthwhile for the OP to turn the thermostat up to maximum just to confirm that it's faulty.

Meanwhile, has the OP done the Meter Sanity Test with the kettle or whatever?  Electricity meters seldom go wildly inaccurate, but it's such a simple and easy check that will make the OP confident they're not being overcharged.

Once the lower immersion heater is working correctly then the OP can do the sums to see whether it's cheaper to be on E7 or single rate.  Might even be worth going on single rate in the summer and E7 in the winter to get the best of both worlds.

jbuchanangb

Now might be the time to call in a heating engineer. If the bottom immersion heater element has failed he/she will know how to drain down the tank and replace it. Even if it is just the thermostat failed, it's better to have a competent person to fix it. At the same time he/she can investigate the "central heating" controller to establish whether it is in the immersion heater circuit at all, and if not, what, if anything it is connected to. You have referred to electric panel radiators in earlier posts, but it is conceivable that you may have an "electric boiler" somewhere and your radiators are fed hot water from that boiler. My daughter was once in a place with what looked like a normal central heating controller, even a little flame lit up when it was calling for heat, but it was connected to an electric boiler which heated up water for radiators.

Gerry1

jbuchanangb said:

Now might be the time to call in a heating engineer. If the bottom immersion heater element has failed he/she will know how to drain down the tank and replace it. Even if it is just the thermostat failed, it's better to have a competent person to fix it. At the same time he/she can investigate the "central heating" controller to establish whether it is in the immersion heater circuit at all, and if not, what, if anything it is connected to. You have referred to electric panel radiators in earlier posts, but it is conceivable that you may have an "electric boiler" somewhere and your radiators are fed hot water from that boiler. My daughter was once in a place with what looked like a normal central heating controller, even a little flame lit up when it was calling for heat, but it was connected to an electric boiler which heated up water for radiators.

The OP shouldn't have to call in a heating engineer, the landlord / letting agent should have provided the details.  However, if the OP provides a few photos of all the radiators, (with some close-up low level ones showing the wire or pipe connections) then forumites can help to identify the system and offer advice.

An electric boiler would certainly explain the presence of the strange programming unit.  However, it would be extremely bad news because absolutely nothing is more expensive to run so the OP would have to start flat hunting again before the winter.

QrizB

Gerry1 said:

Whatever the problem is with the lower immersion heater the OP need not worry, it'll be up to the landlord to fix it, although it would be worthwhile for the OP to turn the thermostat up to maximum just to confirm that it's faulty.

Agreed; if they were owner-occupier they could swap the wires between the upper and lower immersions to get some HW back, but a tenant probably shouldn't go fiddling with this.

Gerry1 said:

Meanwhile, has the OP done the Meter Sanity Test with the kettle or whatever?  Electricity meters seldom go wildly inaccurate, but it's such a simple and easy check that will make the OP confident they're not being overcharged.

Sanity test reported here but no mention of the kettle test. It does seem as though they're happy that the meter is OK now?

Dommyb said:

Last night i looked up how to set up the thermostat screen. And set it to run from 5am-8:30.
however this morning still no hot water…
Really dont know what we’re doing wrong with this, does this mean we NEED that top switch on?..

The upper immersion heater will not switch on unless the top switch is on!

What should happen is that you have the top switch on but the red light only comes on when the controller tells it to.

Can you check that:

• With the top switch on and the controller set to heat the water, the red light is on?
• With the top switch on and the controller set to *not* heat the water, the red light is off?

EssexHebridean

The lower immersion not working could be as simple as the thermal cut-out has tripped. (Apologies if someone has already mentioned this and I’ve missed it). It’s a simple reset if so - the trickiest part of doing ours is wedging yourself into the airing cupboard so you can get a mirror or mobile phone camera to the right point to see what you’re doing! I’d suggest if checking this you do it first thing in the morning allowing for your disjointed night rate - it IS a safety function, and could have tripped because of a fault, in which case you don’t want it trying to fire up again in the small hours while you’re fast asleep. They can also trip for more innocuous  reasons though  so definitely worth a try. The reset on ours is as simple as remove the cover and use a ballpoint pen to press in a little recessed button. 

Dommyb

From what im understanding, the lid on this is supposed to lift up?… it does seem to be on quite securely and its heavy so a bit cautious to try remove that especially as we’re tenants