Will £60 a month be enough for prepayment metre for 1 person?

markin

You may get away with 60 - 90 in the summer it depends on how often and long you shower, water tank or  direct electric, but i would be ready to pay 200 from Nov - March

theoretica

Where in the building is the studio flat?  If you have other heated properties above, below and around you except for one (short?) wall that will help a lot with stopping heat loss in those directions

Mstty

Have a look at my revised reply above, it is possible as a studio flat would probably only have one heater. 

You won't have multiple TV's or lots of duplicate gadgets on at the same time.

The best thing you can do is monitor your energy usage in the summer as that is just you and your electrical items and gadgets and some hot water. That gives you the baseline without heating.

That baseline in summer will generally be 25-30% of your winter use. So if you use 4 kWh a day in summer bank on 12-15kWh a day average in the winter months.

Being a studio flat you might be surrounded by heat from other properties so set your temperature to and of18 and get under that duvet in the studio flat and watch the tablet instead of the more expensive TV.

So it all goes back to the question is your studio flat just somewhere to crash or live. If it's to crash your £60 is doable but to live and cook and heat constantly then start at £90-£100

wrf12345

You need to take daily meter readings and play around with things to see their effect (ie cooking less, quicker showers, not using the heating, etc). You can buy an energy meter from aliexpress for £7 that allows you to monitor devices to see what is eating up the electric (older stuff on standby consumes lots of energy). 1 - 2kw a day usage is achievable but you can end up using loads more than that.

Unfortunately, prepayment meters are an endless rip-off for consumers, not sure if you can get it replaced with a credit meter in rented property.

QrizB

wrf12345 said:

Unfortunately, prepayment meters are an endless rip-off for consumers

This isn't really true.

The standing charge on a SVT prepayment tariff is a few pence per day more expensive than a credit account paid by DD.

The most expensive SVT caps are for credit accounts that aren't paid by DD.

SAC2334

wrf12345 said:

You need to take daily meter readings and play around with things to see their effect (ie cooking less, quicker showers, not using the heating, etc). You can buy an energy meter from aliexpress for £7 that allows you to monitor devices to see what is eating up the electric (older stuff on standby consumes lots of energy). 1 - 2kw a day usage is achievable but you can end up using loads more than that.

Unfortunately, prepayment meters are an endless rip-off for consumers, not sure if you can get it replaced with a credit meter in rented property.

It used to be that prepayment meters were paying a lot more than even the SVR but once the politicians got involved prepayment meters were eventually brought down to SVR rate even though they cost a lot more to run for any supplier than a normal meter on SVR .
Their true costs would be much higher if all the extra factors were added. I can t remember exactly when they were brought back to SVR but at a guess I d say it was around 2012 . 
I used to read meters and was always telling occupiers to exchange to credit meters if they could .Standing charges  and rates were much higher .
 It was all block tariff in those days too with everyone going for a "no standing charge " tariff which was an absolute straight con trick .
If the OP does a few say ,10 day apart meter read s through the next few months then easily caluculate total daily costs  he/she will get some idea of what their general use is now  without heating costs. Heating will be the main cost and whatever you re using now through the summer times it by 3 unless you re going to sit in a down sleeping bag from Nov to March  . also take into account the probable 25% mark up in rates on Oct 1 . 

lohr500

If I was on an SVT tariff with EDF in my region (Yorkshire), based on my high consumption I would currently be better off on a prepayment meter than DD. That's on both their single rate and Economy 7 tariffs, even with the higher PP daily standing charge. Their pre-payment Eco 7 off-peak rate is 16.9% lower than DD.

Joyful

I would be using your meters to build up credit for the winter. Start with putting £100 per month in. If you do this religiously, you should not get a fright come winter.

Gerry1

Joyful said:

I would be using your meters to build up credit for the winter. Start with putting £100 per month in. If you do this religiously, you should not get a fright come winter.

An instant access savings account would be better.  You can get up to 1.5% interest, not a lot but better than nothing and better that the OP gets it rather than then energy supplier.  You can also get all of it back at any time which is seldom the case with an energy supplier, especially if they've gone bust.

It's theoretically possible that a PAYG credit balance can be used to stay on the old rates after an increase, but this now seems less certain.

JonVarnas

I get away with £40 electric and £20 gas a month, so it is doable.