Surprise after calculating gas use each day

Brassneck28

I have been taking meter readings each day and calculating my gas usage now the heating is on. What has worried and surprised me is it works out to about £8 per day! We have the heating set to 19 degrees first thing in the morning and after 3:30pm, heat the water once in the morning and use a gas oven for the evening meal.

Does anyone else think this is high?

MikeJXE

It depends what type of property you live in. I live alone in a 2 bed 1st floor flat and my average usage last month was under £2 a day,  probably no comparison 

dedward67

Sadly, I don't think this is far off.  I live in a four bed detached and have the heating on around 3 hours in the morning and 5 hours at night, condensor boiler set to 60 degrees and thermostat on 20 degrees and generally £5.50 to £6 a day.  In the daytime when others are at work (I work from home), just using a 500 watt oil filled radiator to maintain heat which is reasonably effective and with the thermostat halfway costs around 10/11p on hour in electric.  Over Christmas though, I guess will be talking £8 or so a day for all day central heating.  I would add, we only have a 13Kw boiler (which had been recently installed when we moved in 5 years ago), and does the job OK but been told it's really too small for the house. 

[Deleted User]

dedward67 said:

Sadly, I don't think this is far off.  I live in a four bed detached and have the heating on around 3 hours in the morning and 5 hours at night, condensor boiler set to 60 degrees and thermostat on 20 degrees and generally £5.50 to £6 a day.  In the daytime when others are at work (I work from home), just using a 500 watt oil filled radiator to maintain heat which is reasonably effective and with the thermostat halfway costs around 10/11p on hour in electric.  Over Christmas though, I guess will be talking £8 or so a day for all day central heating.  I would add, we only have a 13Kw boiler (which had been recently installed when we moved in 5 years ago), and does the job OK but been told it's really too small for the house. 

20C and an oil filled radiator? Blimey.

daveyjp

Amount spent is meaningless without tariff information.

I can tell you I spent 75p a day (including SC) in November, but it doesn't mean much without SC and unit cost details.

TheGardener

We have an elderly relative staying for a couple of days, they've just had an operation and will be staying until the end of the week for support. The relative needs to be encouraged to move about and not huddle up under a blanket so yesterday I put the heating on for 10 hours and set the little IHDU (is that what you call it?) to the gas usage screen and we used £6.50 in gas. 3 bed, post-war semi using a combi boiler set to 19C.  The biggest 'leak' we have is 2 dogs so the back door is opened and closed more often than I'd like and yesterday the outside temp was about 5 to 6C...We're on a SVT Octopus. 
Edit: I have noticed that a third of that cost was used in the first 2 hours when the heating came on and build up the heat. 

chris_n

dedward67 said:

Sadly, I don't think this is far off.  I live in a four bed detached and have the heating on around 3 hours in the morning and 5 hours at night, condensor boiler set to 60 degrees and thermostat on 20 degrees and generally £5.50 to £6 a day.  In the daytime when others are at work (I work from home), just using a 500 watt oil filled radiator to maintain heat which is reasonably effective and with the thermostat halfway costs around 10/11p on hour in electric.  Over Christmas though, I guess will be talking £8 or so a day for all day central heating.  I would add, we only have a 13Kw boiler (which had been recently installed when we moved in 5 years ago), and does the job OK but been told it's really too small for the house. 

If it really is too small it isn't that it is too small for the house, it's more it is too small for the heat loss so do something about that rather than fitting a bigger boiler. Your figures suggest you are using about 55kWh per day so with 8 hours use that gives a heat demand  of near enough 6.5kW so well within what your boiler will do.

[Deleted User]

chris_n said:

dedward67 said:

Sadly, I don't think this is far off.  I live in a four bed detached and have the heating on around 3 hours in the morning and 5 hours at night, condensor boiler set to 60 degrees and thermostat on 20 degrees and generally £5.50 to £6 a day.  In the daytime when others are at work (I work from home), just using a 500 watt oil filled radiator to maintain heat which is reasonably effective and with the thermostat halfway costs around 10/11p on hour in electric.  Over Christmas though, I guess will be talking £8 or so a day for all day central heating.  I would add, we only have a 13Kw boiler (which had been recently installed when we moved in 5 years ago), and does the job OK but been told it's really too small for the house. 

If it really is too small it isn't that it is too small for the house, it's more it is too small for the heat loss so do something about that rather than fitting a bigger boiler. Your figures suggest you are using about 55kWh per day so with 8 hours use that gives a heat demand  of near enough 6.5kW so well within what your boiler will do.

It's amazing how often you hear "boiler too small" - when actually many domestic boilers are probably too big.

Astria

[Deleted User] said:

chris_n said:

dedward67 said:

Sadly, I don't think this is far off.  I live in a four bed detached and have the heating on around 3 hours in the morning and 5 hours at night, condensor boiler set to 60 degrees and thermostat on 20 degrees and generally £5.50 to £6 a day.  In the daytime when others are at work (I work from home), just using a 500 watt oil filled radiator to maintain heat which is reasonably effective and with the thermostat halfway costs around 10/11p on hour in electric.  Over Christmas though, I guess will be talking £8 or so a day for all day central heating.  I would add, we only have a 13Kw boiler (which had been recently installed when we moved in 5 years ago), and does the job OK but been told it's really too small for the house. 

If it really is too small it isn't that it is too small for the house, it's more it is too small for the heat loss so do something about that rather than fitting a bigger boiler. Your figures suggest you are using about 55kWh per day so with 8 hours use that gives a heat demand  of near enough 6.5kW so well within what your boiler will do.

It's amazing how often you hear "boiler too small" - when actually many domestic boilers are probably too big.

I normally hear "It takes ages to warm up the house, can we have a bigger boiler fitted?" and normally reply with "You don't need a bigger boiler, you need more or larger radiators" to which the customer normally replies "We don't want more radiators, we want more heat, can't you run the existing ones hotter with a bigger boiler". Sigh.

RelievedSheff

[Deleted User] said:

chris_n said:

dedward67 said:

Sadly, I don't think this is far off.  I live in a four bed detached and have the heating on around 3 hours in the morning and 5 hours at night, condensor boiler set to 60 degrees and thermostat on 20 degrees and generally £5.50 to £6 a day.  In the daytime when others are at work (I work from home), just using a 500 watt oil filled radiator to maintain heat which is reasonably effective and with the thermostat halfway costs around 10/11p on hour in electric.  Over Christmas though, I guess will be talking £8 or so a day for all day central heating.  I would add, we only have a 13Kw boiler (which had been recently installed when we moved in 5 years ago), and does the job OK but been told it's really too small for the house. 

If it really is too small it isn't that it is too small for the house, it's more it is too small for the heat loss so do something about that rather than fitting a bigger boiler. Your figures suggest you are using about 55kWh per day so with 8 hours use that gives a heat demand  of near enough 6.5kW so well within what your boiler will do.

It's amazing how often you hear "boiler too small" - when actually many domestic boilers are probably too big.

Ours is massively over sized. 35kW for a modest sized 3 bed detached new build.

Not sure what the developers were thinking when they installed it!

dunstonh

What has worried and surprised me is it works out to about £8 per day! 

Nothing worrying about that figure for this time of the year.

Does anyone else think this is high?

No. 

Households vary but it can be that as much of 80% of your gas use occurs in just four-five months of the year.