Economy 7

ZimDee

Please can someone let me know if it is true that the economy 7 cheaper night rate only applies to storage heaters and hot water or does it apply to all plugs.  I am confused as have heard different things.  I’m on economy 7 and don’t think it’s cheaper. 

EssexHebridean

Mine switches the whole supply over to off peak. 

If you have storage heaters and an immersion tank for water then E7 definitely should work out cheaper, especially if you can switch other use to off-peak too. At this time of year we use over 90% of our electricity on the night rate. 

macman

It depends how your wiring is configured. Some systems switch the whole supply over to cheap rate, some have  only the NSH's and immersion heater wired to the E7 circuit. 
How is your meter switched? Clockwork meter, or tele-switching?

Gerry1

The cheaper rate applies to all electricity supplied by that meter, including all the 13A sockets.

Often the meter will be connected to additional circuits that are livened up only during the cheap rate periods.  Typically they will supply night storage heaters and an immersion heater.  This ensures that they do not use expensive daytime electricity.

Note that there is often a second immersion heater higher up in the tank.  This will be connected to a 24h circuit and should be used only very rarely, e.g. if the tank is cold after after returning from a holiday, or the hot water has run out after several showers.

A big mistake is to leave the 'halfway up' immersion heater switched on.  This means that most or all the hot water will be charged at the expensive day rate.

The top-up immersion heater often has a local timer similar to a kitchen 'pinger' so that it automatically switches off and stays off after one or two hours.

The day rate is usually more expensive than the equivalent single rate.  Before the energy crisis you had to use about 20% at night before the bill became cheaper.  E7 rates on the Standard Variable Tariff now vary dramatically, so find out your annual usage (actual, not estimated) and do the sums to see whether you'd save by switching supplier.  Unfortunately many are not accepting new customers at this time.

ZimDee

macman said:

It depends how your wiring is configured. Some systems switch the whole supply over to cheap rate, some have  only the NSH's and immersion heater wired to the E7 circuit. 
How is your meter switched? Clockwork meter, or tele-switching?

Thank you - I’m not sure how it is metered they recently changed the meter to a digital one that connects to the smart meter of that helps.

[Deleted User]

macman said:

It depends how your wiring is configured. Some systems switch the whole supply over to cheap rate, some have  only the NSH's and immersion heater wired to the E7 circuit. 
How is your meter switched? Clockwork meter, or tele-switching?

The meter should only be recording to one register at once.  All the electricity, therefore, is either peak or off-peak.  The wiring configuration just determines whether the appliances can be used at all times or only when the off-peak register is active.

The only difference comes with the specialist heating tariffs, which either used two meters or 'two-meters-in-one-box', where different circuits are monitored by different meters.

Given the OP said Economy 7, this complexity can be ignored.

matelodave

Put up a picture of your meter and the wiring around it to the fuse box and you might get a sensible answer rather than a lot of random guesses

dunstonh

ZimDee said:

Please can someone let me know if it is true that the economy 7 cheaper night rate only applies to storage heaters and hot water or does it apply to all plugs.  I am confused as have heard different things.  I’m on economy 7 and don’t think it’s cheaper. 

The answer is, it depends.  Older systems would often have dedictated circuits for the heating/water.  However, later ones would not. It would be a meter with a timer.    Which is what we have.  The digital meter has two registers and it switches between them at the given time and all plugs get it.  

ZimDee

That’s my meters 

[Deleted User]

Don't worry.  It applies to everything in your house.

You might be getting confused that some things only work at off-peak times, but that's just a restriction about when they can be turned on (to stop you accidentally using expensive electricity).  If your tariff is Economy 7, everything is at the same price (either the day rate or the night rate).

lohr500

Could you also post another picture showing the area below the meter on the right. In particular, where the black and red wires go to that run down the right hand side of the installation. Those look to be the two wires feeding the grey fusebox (top left) which
I suspect is the fusebox that will only be "live" during the economy 7 period.