High Energy usage

brooklyn07

Hi,
I've recently moved in with my OH and noticed that he is paying a lot on his bills and just assumed he was being wasteful with electricity but since I've been here a few months now I can see its not the case.
We are using somehwere between 4kwh and 6kwh just overnight between midnight and around 8am.   There is nothing "running" overnight that I can think of, we have gas central heating which doesn't come on until around 6am anyway.
There is only two of us living here in a small terrace and all that is on overnight is 2 mobile phones charging and we do have a fridge freezer and a freezer.  By the end of the evening the monitor is showing total usage of 13kwh

I do work from home and have a laptop on all day but it is off overnight.   I have compared the usage to that of my friends who also work from home, also have 2 fridge/freezers and their usage is only around 6kwh by the end of the evening and only around 1.5kwh overnight so I can't work out whats happening. 

I suspected it could be one of the freezers so bought an energy monitor that plugs into the actual plug of the fridge and monitored it overnight - it seems that they are both only using around 300wh each between midnight and 8am so can't be them.

Can anyone think of what else could be causing this?   We do have TV's plugged in on standby rather than being turned off at the wall but would that really cause such a high usage?

Verdigris

As you have gas heating, the only thing that comes to mind is an immersion heater.

[Deleted User]

Hi,

do you have an immersion heater, maybe not timed and boiling away?

Sea_Shell

How does he heat his water?    Has an electric emersion heater been left on by accident (in addition to gas HW)?

That does seem very high.     

I've just looked at our IHD and we've used 1.25kwh so far today, and that's for 10.5 hours, including 2 cups of coffee, toast and having the heating on (pump running) from 7am.

brooklyn07

we have a combi heater, definitely no immersion or tank or anything, but I've made sure that the feature that pre-heats the water is off so that its not constantly heating water.  So far we have used 6.5KWH and its just me here with my laptop on

theoretica

I would look at the consumer unit and switch circuits off overnight until you narrow in on the culprit.  A freezer should be fine left off and closed overnight.

Sea_Shell

brooklyn07 said:

we have a combi heater, definitely no immersion or tank or anything, but I've made sure that the feature that pre-heats the water is off so that its not constantly heating water.  So far we have used 6.5KWH and its just me here with my laptop on

Well that at least rules that out.    Looks like we all had the same idea and crossed posts with each other!! 


Assuming you have an IHD, what does it say if you look at the current instant consumption figure?

We're currently using 230w.      (heating, laptop, radio...and background household usage)

brooklyn07

it fluctuates and its jumping between 340w and 390w at the moment. No heating on, just my laptop, monitor and I do have a small echo show on in the background of my office but thats it.

Farway

Is there a pond or fish tank?

There have been posts on here where the high unexplained useage was tracked down to these items

Verdigris

Or a hot tub your OH hasn't told you about!

brooklyn07

Nope definitely no pond/tank or any pets of any kind!

I will definitely try the switching main off but will have to do it this evening after work