How was your month? 1 November 2022 at 11:42AM in Energy 92 replies 8.9K views

Workerdrone

QrizB said:

Coffeekup said:

Workerdrone said:

Thank you, your post made me disregard what the plumber had said and have a direct look myself. Ive found a double convector 22 type stelrad unit which is only 1cm wider than my current old imperial one for £150 including delivery. there's enough bend in the microbore to do 5mm each side no sweat. This thing claims to chuck out 7500btu. Stelrad calls for my room call for 5000btu. Current rad is estimated at 1200btu.

It takes around 3 hours to have an effect on the room as it stands and then the boiler keeps firing on and off all night. I can see the heat demand on evohome. Whereas any double convector in the kitchen. (Solid concrete floor, granite worktops and two exterior facing walls heats up the room in 20 minutes.

Im hoping it will liberate more heat into the lounge quickly and drop the return temperature to the boiler better.

Don't go filling your house just yet with too many bigger radiator's with a much higher BTU ratings, you current boiler may struggle to cope with the load.

That's unlikely to be a problem, unless they also make their house larger at the same time. The rate of heat loss from the building is not affected by fitting more or larger radiators.

Its only the one for the moment, the lounge. If it makes an appreciable difference I'll do the two bedrooms next. Boiler size won't be an issue for the simple reason we run zoned heating so the heat follows us around. Its rare we have two zones firing at the same time. I keep an eye on the heat demand from individual zones. Most I've ever had is two rooms putting out 100% heat demand, the lounge puts out 100% demand for a long time due to the inadequate rad but the upstairs bedrooms for a shorter time as I don't heat the rooms as hot.

Nebulous2

Nebulous2 said:

An old stone listed building North of Scotland, so much colder than most of you. We've been making efforts - but somehow electric has gone up. Last October was electric 237 kwh and 129 cubic meters of gas.  This October was 291 kwh and 73 cubic meters of gas, so cutting back on the thermostat appears to have helped. Last year we may have been caravanning more than this one - but we have a family member in the house all the time. 

I thought I'd revisit this - as I'm pleased with progress, not quite a like-for-like, as last year readings covered two more days. The weather may be milder this year as well. 

Electricity this year - 331kwh, compared with 432 last year. 
Gas this year            150 cubic metres, compared with 220 last year. 

I'll settle for that! 

MuckChucker

November tally is in.
I really wanted to keep the elec under 300 but the dryer has had to be used quite a bit. The heating kicked in about mid way through the month, I'd say we're averaging about 20kwh per day gas now, it'll be interesting to see how accurate my December predictions are



Actually, just for comparison seeing as Nov 2021 is the first month showing data on my Bright app.
Nov 2021
Elec - 497
Gas - 1292 (>1000kwh reduction, go.on.my.son!)

MuckChucker

I forgot about this one

Feb scores - nicely under the estimate placeholder I had so significantly down on Feb '22

 

Raxiel

Had a pretty good February, Gas usage followed the trend we had all winter, with a 40% reduction in daily average consumption compared to February 2022 (and a little bit better still compared to 2021).

The sunniest month since we had the PV installed last October meant we did better than expected on the electricity. Import is 47% lower than Feb '22, beating the ~35-40% reduction we've had over the last few months.

Octopus' algorithm continues to be confused by these big reductions, predicting a cost of £239 for this month. By my calculations we'll be paying £161

Dolor

Likewise. We had an excellent solar month in February, up 68% compared to target which reduced our electricity grid import by about 50%. 

Gas usage was down by 20% by running our system boiler at a set temperature of 55C - compared to 65C the year before. It was though a very mild month.

Edit: looking at my bill that came in today, it would seem that there is a lot of LNG in our gas mix as the CV is the highest that I have seen it for many months at 40.1.

ariarnia

feb also not to bad for us. 

135kwh for electric and 533kwh for gas 

down on last month but a bit up on last year (mostly on electric as the kids had new games for christmas and there both still on the consoles whenever they can )

april last year was when we were having a lot of renovations on the house. some things booked in for this year but mostly outside so beating last years total should hopefully be easy enough (fingers crossed!)

Mstty

10% down on last year.

Could have been more but a few creature comforts have crept back in after our cut back to the bone in summer last year.

This could be down to the weather being better this year in February than last year I shall check the weather spreadsheet.

Spoonie_Turtle

Better Feb in large part due to being unable to shower with a cracked bathtub (electric shower, used every 2 days by one person and less frequently by everyone else).  Our heat pump also stopped communicating with the controller on Monday night and we're waiting for an engineer to come tomorrow so that meant markedly less consumption over the last 2 days as well despite having to boil the kettle for when warm water is absolutely necessary.

783kWh this month compared to
1021 last year and
1003 in 2021.

The wet room being done at the moment will have a thermostatic shower instead of the electric one so that will mean less electric usage in future there, but it will enable all of us to have a shower as often as we need and will massively increase our hot water consumption so increase the heat pump usage (should overall still work out cheaper though, heating the water by heat pump rather than electric element).
- it also solves the dilemma of what to do about the heat pump's vampire load in the summer, as we will need to keep it on for hot water (before we didn't think we would need to, with the electric shower and being able to make do with the cold water not being painfully cold in summer).

scobie

Gas usage down from 887 in Jan to 620 in February. 

Electricity down from 109 to 85.  

Of course, Feb is a shorter month. I don’t have measurements from last year to hand