And now we go again...

Sunshine_girl2

Glad to hear your complaint is resolved, mines still ongoing ! 

EssexHebridean

Hello lovely visitors, thanks for popping by! Yes - I’m glad to have a resolution on the 🐙 thing - SG I’m sorry to hear yours is rumbling in but I suspect mine is generally just a bit of a more straightforward thing to resolve. Crossing fingers yours doesn’t take too much longer! 

We get fairly reasonable reviews round here on the Should’veGoneTo lot Vix - and the branch in the next town up is spoken of very highly. We’re a bit low on options nearby though which is annoying - MrEH went to an independent last time round and they were OK but when I looked in there they had a fairly limited range of frames and they were a fair bit more expensive too.

We’re still getting on with Agile well - indeed the last two days have been stonking! Yesterday was low prices pretty much all day aside from the usual 3 hour peak window, we actually switched the central heating off completely in favour of running the underfloor heating in the kitchen and bathroom, and the oil filled  rad in the front room as that worked out cheaper than the gas would have been! Also bunged through several loads of washing including MrEH’s rugby towels - those also got tumble dried. An earlier load went onto the airer in the spare room with the dehumidifier running. Had the oven on for Sunday lunch too - a nice slow cooked lamb shoulder with home grown potatoes and chard. Then when the pricing came through for the today’s Agile rates there was a lovely run of almost entirely negative pricing through from 10.30 last night until 6am this morning - so another load of washing, the dishwasher ran through for a clean (handily I still had a DW cleaner in the cupboard which I think might be one our sellers left behind!) and it was back on with all the heating including the office which I’m sure benefited from a good warm through! It feels very odd to make the mind-shift from trying to minimise energy use across to actively trying to use more - that’s a bit counterintuitive these days isn’t it! The very low and negative prices are at times that the energy needs using though after all. Anyway 25kWh yesterday cost us around 47p, and the overnight tally was a bit over 16kWh and at 6am our daily cost read £-0.07! 😂 - naturally it’s gone up since then but still, not bad at al! We used no gas at all aside from hot water yesterday either, and I left the heating off for this morning too so savings there. 

Makingabobor2

Wow...25KWH in a day. Not sure we could use that even if we had things running all day. Even on a day that I use oven and tumble drier, we rarely get over 8-9kwh a day in winter. Our average seems to be around 6-7. I imagine its the under floor heating using the most.  We have gas CH, so it would only be the pump running that would use the electric. We don't have a DW and the WM & TD are all high rating energy efficient ones, and I don't use oven very often.  If we go over 6 a day, I tell DH off for using his desk top computer too much.....lol.  

EssexHebridean

MAB I really had to get my thinking cap on - the bathroom underfloor doesn't use much - around 300w - and also quickly raises the room to the thermostat temp so clicks off before very long at all. the kitchen however seems to have a defunct thermostat anyway, and so we keep it turned off at the wall generally. With electric at the prices it was for most of Sunday and overnight Monday though - cheaper than gas - it made sense to use it. That gobbles about 750w, and (from  memory the office heating is 1kW) and so a good long run on that heated the whole of downstairs far more cheaply than the CH would have achieved! By the the oven, dehumifdifier, oil filled rad etc were all added in, AND washing/drying, I was quite impressed how high we managed to get it! Of course on our old fix, the amount that 25kWh cost on Sunday would have been under 2kWh - and we would have needed gas heating as well, so there was significant benefits there!  when we moved in we rather felt that the various areas of UFH were a bit pointless - but it was a definite advantage having them the other day!

I cut my post short last night as I was frankly feeling a bit rubbish. I have the start of a cold - that started kicking about on Sunday - but yesterday afternoon I also had what I believe was a visual or retinal migraine. Not anything I'd had before, and was quite alarming until I remembered how good the NHS site is for tracking down odd symptoms without completely giving yourself the heebie-jeebies! Sure it enough, it promptly reassured (?!) me that my shimmering edge-of-vision and bright white darting zig-zag lines in one eye were indeed the key symptoms of a visual migraine, and that it should go away within 20 - 30 minutes, which it did indeed. It DID leave me feeling a bit wobbly though, and I did get a bit of a headache - although nothing like a classic migraine one - shortly after which hung about for the rest of the day. After an evening of sitting feeling "not quite right" I decided to head to bed just after I'd done posting. Aside from the lingering "might be a cold" I feel fine today, so all good there, but obviously I will need to keep an eye for anything like that happening again.

Anyway, aside from extracting as much value as possible from very cheap electricity, what have we been up to... 
- Banks checked and all fine there - it's all downhill to the end of the month now 
- I shall be holding off doing anything with surplus until next week because I know there will be another fill of MrEH's car and another feed of his Oyster, too. 
- Shopping this week was pricey - but I have slack in the grocery account this month, and it enabled a lot of stocking up too - I did a FF visit on saturday afternoon for tinned stuff - tuna, black beans, chick peas, other beans and also nabbed a 3-pack of N@p0l1na branded chopped toms for 99p which is a decent price. It was also a farmers market week, and I nabbed a nice sized lamb shoulder and some liver from Peter, and burgers, a lump of haslet and something else that I have since forgotten from Catherine, plus our usual monthly treat of a posh sourdough from the lovely bread chap whose name I can't recall. 
- The freezer is now chocka again, but I have a plan for various bits of stuff to come out of it for batch cooking over the next month, and there are more previously made bits which will also be coming out of there - a black bean chilli for tomorrow, as a starting point! 
- I managed to harvest 2 more small courgettes from the garden at the weekend - if we get any more now I will be quite surprised but there are still a few which appear to be swelling a bit, so perhaps. 
- Toms are still ripening and being moved into the fridge ready for use as and when they have. 

That's probably about us for now. It's that quiet bit of the month, isn't it! 

PennysIntoPounds

Hope you manage to fend the potential cold off, take zinc, lots of water and sleep, and have extra calories if you fancy them rather than being 'good', bodies work hard behind the scenes especially when it's feeling shoddy season.
I've only had visual migraines a couple of times but as someone who's not generally headachey they're initially very worrying aren't they! Indulgent sleep and cosy lovely things prescribed 😊

Cheery_Daff

I've had a few visual migraines in the last few years (but never before, I suspect it's age/hormone related for me). They are very odd! I didn't recognise the first for what it was - I was at a band rehearsal, and couldn't see the sheet music properly, it was just dancing across the page 😮 Fortunately the person next to me had experienced them before and recognised the symptoms - I'd never heard of them! 

I've had a few since and they always start with feeling a bit non-specifically weird before I recognise the characteristic kaleidoscope patterns in front of my eyes... They slowly move off to one side over the course of 20 minutes or so, and things go back to normal. Fortunately never (so far) followed by a normal headache for me.

Exciting news on agile - we're going to switch i think, I meant to do it tonight but got sidetracked. Don't think we'd be able to manage 25kwh though!! I don't think we've ever gone above 9 in day in all the time I've been tracking! 😮

***edited to add - I'm talking rubbish, we used 10.5kwh yesterday, apparently! 😂😂********

No under floor heating here though (sadly 🙄) and no tumble dryer - I imagine that would help! 

Wonder if I could get a timer to switch the oil filled radiator on for a bit in my study before I got up on working at home days?? It's always bloody freezing in there, and we never have the normal central heating on the timer, but it'd be nice to have the chill off that room! 🤔

greenbee

Timer switch for your oil filled radiator is a great idea.

I'm seriously considering switching for the winter as I'm exporting so little. And I have electric towel rails in the bathrooms and utility room which I can programme. No electric UFH sadly, as the bathrooms could really do with it. 

rtandon27

When we eventually replace the bathroom, UFH is top of my list!

badmemory

Mine is not even yielding enough to do the base load of the house a lot of days, let alone the wm, dw & tumble drier.

EssexHebridean

The threatening cold is now suggesting it is going to be tonsilitis instead which is a bit of a bu99er - I've managed to dodge it for years now so this sort of slipped under the radar by pretending to be a cold - bad tonsils!  I don't feel grim in myself, and am now necking cups of the hottest tea I can manage in a bid to encourage the germy little bar stewards that they would like to go and infect someone else! 

RT - although the UFH comes in useful for times of Agile negative pricing, I have to say that the first thing we did when we got into the house pretty much was to organise getting a proper radiator in that room, although that is in part because the UFH is electric - if it were part of a wet system it would be far more economical! 

PiP & Cheery thank you for the solidarity on the visual migraines thing, they really are extremely strange! Reading anything was bad enough while it was going on but I can't begin to imagine what kind of fresh hell trying to decipher sheet music must have been!

So with bumping up use on Agile - without the heating aspects of what we did on Sunday it would only have been around the 10kWH level - BUT because the electric prices were so low, it made sense to use all the electric heating we could and turn off the GCH.  Same with the overnight use - because the point of the negative prices is to encourage people to use as much as possible, it made sense to use that electric heating again - and not only save the gas use first thing, but also to get paid for doing so. Again - our Monday use included around 15kWh that we just wouldn't have used normally because of the gas heating, but we were able to heat the house and get paid a few pennies for doing so. Timers on heaters (obviously only ones that you are entirely comfortable are OK to be left turning on and off) are a good idea - that was how I set up ours in the front room. 

Money stuff is still trickling along as normal for this point in the month.
- Whether there will be another diesel fill on MrEH's car depends on what he decides to do about our trip to Devon - as things stand thanks to the tonsils it's not looking like I can go - although there is a possibility we might be able to go tomorrow instead of tonight if my tonsils back off and start behaving. He may still go regardless though, which is fair enough as there's no reason why he should miss out as well. We'll see.
- My maths say that he will also need to feed the Oyster at some stage next week. 
- Did a load of washing at an average of around 11p/kWh last night and that got pegged out this morning as we have sunshine at home. 
- D/W also ran through as it was pretty much full anyway. 
- There will definitely be a PB's purchase this month - although how much will depend on what happens about Devon
- Grocery spending needs to be at an absolute minimum over the next few weeks as we get back to making an impact on the freezer. MrEH did just manage to get rolls into it last night but I'm not sure how!