Is this how you check your Electric meter?

donnalou · 19 September 2005 at 10:26PM

I thought that there was something with my Electric Meter we were using over 600kw a month. So I've been recording my meter reading everyday for the past week. Yesterday the meter went up by 113kw in a day! I phoned Npower who told me to record the reading then turn every appliance of for 10 minutes then turn my PC on for 1 1/2 hours if the PC uses more than 1kw then there is something wrong with my meter, Surely that can't be right how can a PC use that much Electricity.

angelatgraceland · 20 September 2005 at 1:25AM

I started reading mine this week. Do not read the last figure which is tenths of a unit-this would make your reading WAY out. This last digit on my meter is a different colour to the others. For example, yesterday Iread my meter and it read
95968.5
today it read 95993.3
I ignore that last digit on each reading. Therefore I used 25 kw in one day.
Just make sure you are recording WHOLE numbers.
600kw per month is on average only 150 kw per week tho which should cost about £15 per week. When you say you used 113 kw in one day, are you sure it wasnt 11.3 kw?

donnalou · 20 September 2005 at 9:37AM

I do ignore the last number. £15 a week for electricity is a stupid amount to be paying our bill was £250 for 5 months electricity.That was using 3214kw! There are two of us in a small flat we are both at work during the day.We have oil heating. We are using twice as much electric now as we did in our previous place. N Power tell me the average is £25 a month. To use 3214kw in 5 months it works out at 21kw a day, but since I've been recording it. We were using between 9-12kw a day. It didn't make sense until it jumped 113kw in one day

robnye · 20 September 2005 at 10:29AM

we have oil heating

have you recently switched on your heating?
presumably you are using electricity to heat the oil.......
to be honest i dont know the hows and wherefors when using oil heating, but i would hazard a guess that this it s the reason why you are using a lot

donnalou · 20 September 2005 at 11:16AM

yes thats just what i thought, so i tryed turning the boiler off and turning it back on when we needed it, but didn't seem to make much difference. My landlady told me that its only on standby so only kicks in when you switch on the heating or turn on the tap, I pretty new to it myself.

jen_jen_2 · 20 September 2005 at 1:08PM

with regard to the oil - do you have a tank in the garden if so then it shouldnt cost electricity, you burn the oil to heat the water/radiators - you will also need to check your tank for oil and fill up when it gets near the end.

chris73 · 20 September 2005 at 10:05PM

Oil powers the burners and heats the oil but most boilers also use electricity to run a fan to exhaust the fumes, and an electric pump to circulate the water around the radiators, even so with both combined they shouldn't total more than 120w - 150w and use about 1 unit (1kwh) every 7.5+ hours even assuming they were running continuously - which of course thanks to thermostats, they wont!.

Do you have a meter which has the little metal wheel which turns at a speed determined with the amount of Electricity that you are currently consuming. If so, how fast, roughly is this wheel spinning? try and count in seconds the amount of time taken for the black mark / line on the wheel to complete one full revolution.

An average Pentium 4 PC with lots of goodies will only use about 100w - 120w and a TFT Monitor about 50w - a conventional monitor will consume around 60w -120w depending on the size of the screen. Certainly nowhere near 1kw.

Are you using any appliances which consume a lot of power?. These include Tumble Dryers, Electric cookers. Fan Heaters, Convector Heaters, immersion heaters, dish washers.

Other appliances which will also bump up your bill if used for very long or regular periods include Halogen Uplighters, Halogen Floodlights, Electric Irons, Power Washers, Hairdryers.

A friend of mine suddenly noticed a huge leap in his electricity bill when he purchased 3 halogen uplighters as a set at a 'bargain' price from a DIY store, without knowing that they are probably the most wasteful and expensive way of lighting a room with their huge power guzzling 300 - 500W tubes running for several hours a day during the winter months could easily cost you a small fortune.

Are you also using the same oil fired boiler for Hot Water?, you don't have an immersion heater as well do you? or underfloor heating? - some newer flats have both.

donnalou · 20 September 2005 at 11:02PM

Thanks for that Chris
I do have a fridge freezer, washing machine and dishwasher that I know are all A rated, I also have an electric cooker that I'm unsure about, We use the same boiler for water too.So we don't have have any other sort of immersion heater or anything.I think that Npower were trying to get out of sending someone out to look at our meter so I told them the PC used over 2kw. I know that there is definatly something wrong with the meter,after all it did jump 113kw in aday.

chris73 · 20 September 2005 at 11:56PM

An Electric Cooker will use quite a large amount of current, especially if there is more than 1 ring on at a time and the oven / grill in use. This would be more likely to be expensive if you had a large family rather than just 2 of you, and I still doubt that you would clock up 119kw a day, unless you were cooking all day!.

As a rule of thumb a ring on a cooker can consume between 1kw and 2kw each, An Electric Oven around 2.5kw - 3kw and Grill around 1.5kw - 2.5kw again these can vary depending on the type and size of cooker.

Lets assume that you could be running two rings at 2kw each and a 3kw oven all at the same time, then this will equal 7kw of consumption which will use 7 units (kwh) per hour if run continuously. Of course, thanks to thermostats it probably wont all be running non stop for an hour, but it gives you a working idea of the potential for the cookers consumption.

Again it shouldn't be the culprit for 119kw's in one day!, but it would mean that your Electricity bills may be slightly higher than a similar couple using a gas cooker for example.

angelatgraceland · 21 September 2005 at 11:08AM

Insist on that meter check! There just must be something wrong with it. I use a lot of appliances for my £15 pw and there are 5 of us(we DO need to cut back!!!!). Ive never used that much in a day though-good job you checked it! Good luck.

Cagey · 21 September 2005 at 11:38PM

Are you sure it is not a meter with 2 decimal points. Some electronic meters have 2 decimal points.

Most if not all domestic meters are billed on 5 digits. Did you give the supplier 5 or 6 numbers ?. Just a thought & I am possibly talking cr--.

Is this how you check your Electric meter?

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