How best to help my neighbour?

k_man

Even if the immersion heater is left on, unless the tank has no insulation (and is in a poorly insulated location) I can't see it using upto 20kWh per day?

Gerry1

pochase said:

Don't do the standing order. He will be charged a higher rate and cost will increase if you do. 

You should go for a variable monthly direct debit order, so you will pay each month only for what you are charged. Drawback is that the bills in winter will be much higher, so you need to budget for this.

Plus you should make a decision if he wants to go to proper use of storage heaters, otherwise the E7 tariff is more expensive than the a single tariff.

Best solution is likely to be staying on E7 but checking that all the storage heaters are working correctly with no failed elements, that he turns the input control up, turns the output control right down before going to bed and up again in the evening if it gets chilly.  He can then forget the halogen heaters and use the immersion heater only on the night rate as described above.

He could even consider switching to single rate in the summer and E7 in the winter; the SVT E7 rates aren't all the same and some companies in some areas have very low off peak rates but very high daytime rates. e.g. EDF.

wild666

ellymoo said:

My neighbour, a pensioner, asked me for help with his electricity bill a few months ago and I now have authority to deal with his account (he doesn't have access to email, internet, etc.). He was paying £300 a month for a 1 bed flat. He has no washing machine nor dishwasher, spends all his time down the allotment and doesn't believe in heating. He had only given the supplier 1 reading since moving in so we got that sorted out and I also got a smart meter installed for him. His payments were reduced to £90 a month. A month or so ago they went up to £130. Now Scottish Power have emailed again to tell him that they need to go up to £196 a month. This despite the fact we are going into summer and the guy scarcely turns his lights on!

He is apparently on a variable rate which is not helping him - so should he stay on this, or fix? I don't know how to help him for the best but there is no way he should be paying so much when he doesn't use anything. Thank you.

Take readings from his meters, that's assuming he uses electric and gas, then take another reading 7 days later, multiply the weekly readings by 4.5 and this will give a slight overestimate of his monthly usage. Do the same for gas and don't forget to add the SC for the week/month to the totals. 

If he barely uses any electric or gas then his bills would be very low if he's out all day and has no heating on. Someone might have set his heating to come on at certain times if so turn it off so that he can turn the heating on when he feels cold.

Some days I use as little as 1.5 kWh of electric in a day and others as much as 11.3 kWh, most f my usage is cooking and usage on the PC but even then my yearly usage is only 1400 kWh for electric and just over 900 kWh for gas.

Has he by any chance signed up to an expensive fixed tariff? This could have him paying around 38p plus per kWh for electric and over 11p plus per kWh for gas with SC's of over £1 per day between the electric and gas. 

wild666

theoretica said:

Check 1 - do his current usage and payments match?  What happened to all the overpayments form paying £300 a month?   Was it just the overpayments that reduced the payments to £90?

Check 2 - a flat you say.  Does the meter he is paying for definitely match the electricity he is using? And only his?  Not paying for the flat next door instead or as well?  Someone will link soon to the excellent 'meter sanity test'.

If the person is in a ground floor flat then one or both meters could be outside but on upper floors they are likely to be inside the flat but it wouldn't hurt to check the numbers for the meters against the ones on the bills.

QrizB

wild666 said:

ellymoo said:

My neighbour, a pensioner, asked me for help with his electricity bill a few months ago and I now have authority to deal with his account (he doesn't have access to email, internet, etc.). He was paying £300 a month for a 1 bed flat. He has no washing machine nor dishwasher, spends all his time down the allotment and doesn't believe in heating. He had only given the supplier 1 reading since moving in so we got that sorted out and I also got a smart meter installed for him. His payments were reduced to £90 a month. A month or so ago they went up to £130. Now Scottish Power have emailed again to tell him that they need to go up to £196 a month. This despite the fact we are going into summer and the guy scarcely turns his lights on!

He is apparently on a variable rate which is not helping him - so should he stay on this, or fix? I don't know how to help him for the best but there is no way he should be paying so much when he doesn't use anything. Thank you.

Take readings from his meters, that's assuming he uses electric and gas ...

He's all-electric!

pochase

@wild666
If you read the whole thread you will see that he is no low energy user, 3705KWh for 4.5 months on a smart meter.

Broomstick

Before he manages to get his landlord to agree to upgrade the system, in order to help him to remember to switch his electricity off, would he be able to set a kitchen timer that would beep after the requisite time, or even an alarm clock?  I resorted to using a timer when I realised that I could manage with hot water for half an hour every other day but the system's controls couldn't manage that.

ellymoo

I'm going to print all these out and give them to him. I really appreciate all your help!

LADYXXMACBETH

Using portable heaters is very expensive. Could it be that when he says he doesn't have the heating on he means his main heating system?
He'd need more than an extra jumper if he wasn't heating the house. It gets very, very cold in a house, sometimes colder than outside. 
My grandma claims she doesn't have the heating on except she does, she just doesn't have the boiler on. Her bill was £1500 for the quarter. 

Gerry1

ellymoo said:

I'm going to print all these out and give them to him.

You'll have to summarise the BG video.  Assuming he has old-style Box of Bricks NSHs rather than clever High Heat Retention programmable ones with a fan and a convector (e.g. Dimplex Quantum), it's basically:-

• Turn Input Control to maximum

• Turn Output Control to minimum when going to bed

• Turn Output Control up if it gets chilly in the late afternoon or evening