Best ways of cutting energy usage?? Last year 63,000 Kwh Gas and 9,300 electric

Jonesy_40

Some context - We moved into a grade 2 listed house in 2020. It has two new boilers, two gas meters and one electricity meter. I have a gas/electric account with British Gas and a gas account with Ovo Energy. It is just me, my wife and two under 6 children. Both accounts are on variable rates so I am very worried about affording our energy bills moving forward. We did have a gas Aga, which thankfully we took out in January. Can anyone recommend good ways of cutting back on energy usage? I have British Gas coming to install a smart meter on Saturday, but Ovo say they can't install one for some reason.
Any help appreciated! 

Ultrasonic

How big is the house?

Mstty

Best advice may well be to sell up and move into a modern well insulated house?

Depends how financially crippling those bills are to you and how well the family can do with cold or using parts of the house not the whole house?

What_time_is_it

Presumably the heating is gas?
If so, your electricity usage sounds very high.

What_time_is_it

If you are committed to staying there then I would advise on getting as much insulation as possible/appropriate. Get your boiler services regularly too of course.
In winter, do you need to heat all the rooms?
And there must be ways you can get that electricity bill down too.

pochase

You are looking at £1100 in average per month at the new predicted SVT. And that does not take into account the second £100 standing charge for gas.

BUFF

very generic advice:
insulate & draughtproof where you can (I realise that you will be restricted by listing)
Make sure that boilers are running at flow/return temps to condense most of the time
hopefully with new boilers you also have a good level of controls -  heat only to reasonable levels (& wear more layers of clothing), don't heat to the same level when you are tucked up in bed (night setback) & don't heat unused rooms to the same level as rooms in use.
Do you have stored hot water? If so, how heated, to what temp & how long for/schedule?

Try to work out what is actually using your electricity - use smart meter or smart plug with energy monitoring (e.g. Tp-link P110) - & with that info act accordingly
make sure that all light bulbs are LED & switched off when not needed
do you have fish tanks, ponds or hot tub/swimming pools as these can all use large amounts of electricity?

Jonesy_40

What_time_is_it said:

Presumably the heating is gas?
If so, your electricity usage sounds very high.

Yes, gas heated. Got to try to figure out why the electricity is so high.

Robin9

Jonesy_40 said:

What_time_is_it said:

Presumably the heating is gas?
If so, your electricity usage sounds very high.

Yes, gas heated. Got to try to figure out why the electricity is so high.

Go through the house - room by room - inc the garage, the shed, the garden pond (we've had jammed pumps before!), the attic.  look for the high energy users -  the big fridge/freezers, water heaters, the fan heaters in the children's bedrooms, lots of 50w halogens, ignore the battery chargers,

Read that meter regularly - several times a day. Keep a diary

funny.money

Sorry I wouldn't know where to begin to offer advice but I am curious to know why someone would have two gas meters/accounts, and would that incur two lots of standing charges,  would combining be possible/cut costs?

Jonesy_40

What_time_is_it said:

If you are committed to staying there then I would advise on getting as much insulation as possible/appropriate. Get your boiler services regularly too of course.
In winter, do you need to heat all the rooms?
And there must be ways you can get that electricity bill down too.

Thanks for the response.
No, we only heat rooms we are in and the the bedrooms at night. Although the radiator in our room was broken all last year, so only 2 bedroom radiators at night.
The roof is well insulated. All the windows were fitted with internal Storm secondary glazing windows in 2020 so we shouldn't be losing too much heat this way. The boilers are both Vaillant  Eco Tec Plus 838's installed in 2018 - I'm not sure how efficient they are.
Trying to figure out why the electricity is so high!