Octopus to EDF - please help beginner in a pickle

Mark_d

If your thermostat is set to 18 then it means no room will be warmer than 18.  Some could be far below this temperature.  I would suggest maybe 22 degrees.  We warned that changing the thermostat should make no difference at all, at the moment, because your house is not getting warm enough to trip the thermostat.

If your radiators are cold at the top but warm at the bottom, the this would suggest trapped air in the system.  Bleeding the radiators would solve this problem and it's good practice to do this from time to time anyway.  But it sounds like your issue is bigger than trapped air.

If you have boiler cover, like British Gas HomeCare, it may well cover your central heating system.  They should be able to help diagnose your issue even if you then need to engage another company to, for example, remove sludge from your system.  If you don't have HomeCare cover then maybe you want to consider paying for this cover - noting that you won't be able to claim for the first 14 days

rebeccaqphan

@Mark_d

Hi - thanks so much for your reply. I'll look into daught excluders. Our thermostat may be set to 30 but when the radiator is on I’m still in 3 good layers – one thermal, one wool sweater and majority in my fluffy robe or my winter coat indoors as it’s so cold even when the heater is on / has been on 2-3 hours.

We’ve noticed that the heating could be on 2-3 hours but the radiator itself still be cold. The pipes leading to the radiator not cold though? My husband has “breathed”?? the radiators a few days ago but that hasn’t done much either. Maybe I need to call someone out to this.

I replaced all of the radiators in the house with energy efficient ones approx 2 years ago - so they shouldn't be broken yet, surely?

Neil49

It doesn't sound like the heating system is working correctly. How old is it? 

If you don't know what you are doing then it may pay you to get an engineer in to check over the entire system. 

Hold fire with switching suppliers for the time being. 

rebeccaqphan

thanks so much @Neil49 and @Mark_D. I changed all my radiators approx 2 years ago. They worked fine for the first winter but now just don't work and are always cold. It's obvious that gas is still pumping through them though as our bills are through the roof!!

t0rt0ise

By the way, you bleed radiators, not breathe them. You open the bleed valve until all the air is gone and water trickles out. If there's no water coming out then there's something wrong with the radiator. I'd get a plumber in to give the whole system the once over.

Mark_d

@rebeccaqphan

There are many possibilities why your radiators are not getting warm.  Perhaps the boiler temperature is set too low (mine is 67 degrees), perhaps your boiler is not burning gas correctly (maybe blocked flue), maybe there is sludge in your central heating system, maybe the water pressure has fallen too low.  A central heating engineer should be able to test things and ensure you can get the system working.

If it was me, I would sign up for British Gas HomeCare and because a claim can't be made in the first 14 days, I'd try leaving the heating on for 24 hours at 25 degrees to see if the radiators do eventually warm up.  You need to be careful though because if the boiler isn't functioning correctly, then every hour the boiler is on could mean that carbon monoxide is being produced.

If you don't already have a carbon monoxide alarm, I'd seriously recommend you get one without delay

Bobbie320

Even with a saving of 20% on both your use of Electricity and Gas, EDF work out nearly £350 cheaper over the year. At the mentioned use and prices, the difference is approximately £450 per year.

Do you know how to use a spreadsheet? If so, set one up with the information and do some tests. If not, see if you can attend a local computer-learning class. It will be the most useful thing you can learn and save you a lot of money in the long run if you prepare your household budgets and annual income/expenditure. (See MSE's budget pages.)

We spend about £70 pcm on EDF electricity and about £70 pcm on LPG (no mains gas available), for a 5-bedroom, semi-detached house. We are retired and elderly (2 of us) and like a warm house. The thermostat is set at 21.5 for most of the day/evening, and 18.5 for night. Radiators in unused rooms are set at minimum and no room strikes cold upon entering it. However, it is an old house, built in 1873, and we have spent money on outside cladding, which reduced our gas consumption by almost 40%.

Good luck!

Gerry1

kimwp said:

Gerry1 said:

Beware of leaving unoccupied rooms with no heating at all: you risk damage to your property and health if you get mould ! 😨

TRVs set to low will help to avoid this problem.

Also get a few cheap temperature/ hygrometer units for these rooms.  If the humidity remains too high then consider getting some dehumidifiers.

But you may have to accept that with such a large property your gas usage can't be reduced significantly.

I'd say humidity would be more of a concern for mould - a cold dry room won't get mould. But a warm wet one definitely will.

I don't heat my loft bedroom or box room - no mould so far.

Agreed, it's the humidity that does the damage.  However, the room humidity rockets as the temperature goes down, so the OP risks having cold and humid rooms rather than cold and dry ones.

Grumpy_chap

rebeccaqphan said:

My household comprises 3 people (myself, my husband and our 6 year old daughter). Yesterday when working out our energy usage (for the first time ever) and we were shocked with how much gas we use a year! 

Our average electricity annual usage is 2295kWh BUT our gas annual usage is 20269kWh. We both work and are out of the house 8am - 6pm weekdays. The hot water and heating is only on twice a day from 6am - 8am in the morning and 5pm to 8pm in the evening.

Our house has 6 double bedrooms 

2. I realised that our thermostat was set to 30 degrees so have reduced that to 25. Our house is always so cold (always wearing at least 3 layers) so I didn't even realise it was set to 30. Is setting to 25 standard or is it higher or lower please?

I've seen the EDF energy on MSE and used the calculator on here yesterday which gave me a saving of 18% or greater so catergorised as "strongly worth considering".

You have a large house, so the heating bill will be larger than average.

Have you had the central heating system serviced regularly?  The full system, not just the boiler.
I say this because we had a cold winter just now and our heating system was struggling to get the house to even a tolerable temperature at times.  A couple of weeks back the pump failed so we had to get it replaced.  Not only does the heating system now work well, the daily gas demand has dropped from >100 kWh to in the region 50 - 60 kWh.  We are now trimming the system controls so may achieve the 50kWh as a daily demand.

25 deg C is high for the thermostat, but that may be influenced by location.  Even so, you say the house is always cold.  When the heating is on, does the system just keep running continuously?  This could mean the boiler is simply under-sized.  It could be another fault - perhaps even similar to what we found, the pump performance.  Do all the radiators get warm?  Are all the radiators properly bled?

If you are considering EDF, you may wish to consider their customer service ratings as part of the assessment.

Gerry1

It can take quite a while to bleed a radiator.  Open the TRV fully and listen for the air hissing out.  If part is hot you can judge progress by the hot/cold boundary moving up.

However, if the TRV is stuck shut it may take significantly longer, so make sure it does open before attempting to bleed the radiator.

Also check that the header tank in the loft is full because the ballcock may be stuck.