High Gas Usage

jmcdyre

Hi all

My girlfriend and I are using a lot of gas at home, around 50kwh per day and would like advice on getting this down.

Our house is heated by a combi boiler, but we don't have a room thermostat - we just have a timer and thermostat on the boiler itself.

I've bought a room thermostat and intend to get it fitted in the next few days, but was wondering if this is likely to have a significant effect on our usage, like for like against the boiler thermostat?

Thanks, John

notbritishgas

jmcdyre wrote: »

Hi all

My girlfriend and I are using a lot of gas at home, around 50kwh per day and would like advice on getting this down.

Our house is heated by a combi boiler, but we don't have a room thermostat - we just have a timer and thermostat on the boiler itself.

I've bought a room thermostat and intend to get it fitted in the next few days, but was wondering if this is likely to have a significant effect on our usage, like for like against the boiler thermostat?

Thanks, John

Firstly in my opinion 50kwh of gas a day is not very high for a winter period, I am currently using about 600 kwh per week and the national average is about 20000 per year ( obviously this takes account of the summer period as well).
If you have no room stat do your radiators not have thermostatic valves? this is the normal practice and would probably suit your needs better as you could control the temperature in individual rooms whereas a room stat only responds to one room.
You already have some control as when the water returning from the radiators reaches a set temperature (ie the rooms should be warm) the boiler stat will switch the boiler off.

Cardew

I would agree with the post above - 50kWh in winter is very low.

The boiler thermostat just controls the temperature of the water in the system.

IMO it would be better to fit TRVs(Thermostatic Radiator Valves) to each radiator. Not expensive or difficult to fit.

The advantage of these are that you can control the temperature of each room. With a room(wall) thermostat the location of it determines the temperature for the whole house.

jmcdyre

Thanks for replies,

We don't have TRV's - that's something else I am looking into. At the minute it's the boiler thermostat on it's own that controls our heating (and us running upstairs when we get to hot to turn it down or off). We tend to have the boiler on for an hour or so in the morning before work, and say 4 hours in the evening. The usage at the minute is 50kwh, and reducing slowly as would be expected now we're in Spring - during the winter months it was 60+ per week day and more for weekends.

Was more annoyed that we are paying npower £51 a month (including some catch up from previous bills) for the 2 of us, and £56 a month for electricity (although we have managed to get that under control). Before January we were paying £31 and £32 respectively, and this seems like the obvious place to reduce expenditure now our mortgage has gone up!