Bills
- Thread starter h4rm0ny
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Soldato
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Increased Gas usage to compensate for lost heat from using lower powered bulbs?
If anyone is wondering how to do the same - go to Home Bargains. I Replaced 12 of our 50W Halogen spotlights with 1W LED spotlights @ 99p each. They're absolutely brilliant and I'm sure I'll see that £12 back in no time.
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I don't remember, but I remember my gf giving the reading and them estimating it the same for the next annual bill.
Wasn't particularly efficient tbh before I put foot down eg TV left on standby, mobile chargers in and on but no phone, lights sometimes left on.
In autumn if cold its time put a jumper on. In short we have on the face of it drastically reduced consumption and yet price has remained the same. I think its a swizz. A colleague whose Dads a builder puts LEDs in all his homes and claims leaving them on constantly would cost £40 for the year.
Oh also to add to consumption savers we have also bought in the same year A++ fridge freezer (annual cost £37.50 or something similar) and an A+ washing machine and a new cooker that is "a very efficient model" and will "bring your gas bills down" /troll.
Now I'm questioning is energy efficiency a lie....
Will need to dig out meter readings as you say but hmmm.m
Associate
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maybe switch to a monthly direct debit tariff where you have to submit a meter reading every month (not estimating). Can you get a smart meter put in?
Increased Gas usage to compensate for lost heat from using lower powered bulbs?
If anyone is wondering how to do the same - go to Home Bargains. I Replaced 12 of our 50W Halogen spotlights with 1W LEN spotlights @ 99p each. They're absolutely brilliant and I'm sure I'll see that £12 back in no time.
That is exactly where I got my LED 4w bulbs from and all the others
No gas use will have tumbled. Previously had an immersion heater that went on once in AM (20mins) twice at night (30mins and 10mins as we have bath before bed and nookie)
Edit: Heating went on hardly ever except in or on very cold nights. And not all night either
Smart meters reap electricity though don't they?
Associate
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it'll be a very tiny amount, but is it not better to use the smart meter as it'll give you a live view of exactly how much your using and even tell you how much you have used in monetary terms so far that day. So you'd be able to see how much certain things are using and it'll make you more conscious of what you are using. instead of just guessing how much your going to use in the next 365 days then get a massive bill at the end of the year because you aren't really noticing what you are using.
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Soldato
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Depends on the number of bulbs! Assuming a tariff of 15p per kwh and ignoring standing charges, one of your 4w bulbs will cost £5.25 to run for a year. a 1W LED just £1.31. So if you have somewhere between 8 and 30 LEDs in your home, he's right!
"I estimate I owe you **** all!"
Soldato
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Indeed. They are on for a fraction though.
The biggest energy user was undoubtedly the immersion heater.
I just ca t fathom how at the amount how the yearly bill isn't down by at least £200 though. May get a smart meter to see what's costing.
Cheers
Deleted member 651465
Deleted member 651465
An A+ rated washing machine can be rated at A for the washing cycle, but advertised at A+ for the rest of it. Not saving that caused the additional use but the manufacturers have sneaky ways to promote headline figures like this. Check the specs.
unless you've got a great deal on your tariff that would often be a needlessly expensive way of tracking usage
changing light bulbs to save 10 Watts won't make much difference in the grand scheme of things when you're talking about a bill of 1.5k (you get a bit more impact when you've got say a house full of the old 100w ones)
say you left a light bulb on 24 hours a day for a whole year (which you presumably don't do) 10w*24h*365 = 87.6 kwh
at say 15p per kwh * 87.6kwh = £13.14 saving
Obviously you don't leave bulbs on all day... but assuming you've got a handful in the lounge (6) that are on for 6 hours (36 hours of daily usage total across the bulbs)
maybe some in the landing (2) for 8 hours (16 total) some in the bedroom (4) for 2 hours (total 8)
then from those bulbs you've got (£13.14 /24 hours) * (36 + 16 + 8) an annual saving of £32.85 from reducing from 17 w to 7w... on a bill of £1.5K a slight adjustment to the rate you're charged fro Kwh will come to more than that
(obviously this is just a very rough, back of a fag packet, example - you've no doubt perhaps got more bulbs... maybe in total you're really saving over £100 from it... but again it isn't going to make a huge dent in it and simply shopping around for a better tariff could well save you more overall)
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Soldato
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This is what I do. I like to be in control and aware of any upcoming bills.
Putting that the other way round, I could point out that that last remark about having a personality is rather offensive to those of us that have enough foresight, and cynicism, to keep a wary eye on bills.
I'm also a little curious as to how anybody, you or others, know what "most" people do in this regard? I certainly haven't seen any competently researched national polling data.
Personally, I've always made a point of keeping a brief check on such metered services, mainly because personal experience tells me that "estimates" always seem to err in favour of the utility company.
A few years ago I stuck a little monitoring contraption on the mains supply at the point of entry into the house which sends usage readings every x minutes to a receiver/display that then connects to a PC via USB and logs the data. So I can see instant or average usage at a glance, or from time to time, check the history data. There are several such devices available, ranging in cost from about £20 to £50 or so.
There's not much point in me quoting current usage costs, mainly because they're very close to £0 per year. With the new house, we spent rather a lot on energy efficiency, insulation, solar, ground source heat pump, storage, and so on. It cost a lot up front to do, but is environmentally friendly, will pay for itself over a few years and gives a considerable degree of independence both from energy companies and from the uncertainty of both future supply and prices. That system comes with pretty sophisticated monitoring and recording capabilities, precisely because such monitoring provides an early detection facility for system problems .... like a malfunctioning thermostat. It also sends me an alert if various trigger points are tripped, like out of range instant, daily or weekly usage. It just requires basic tuning of the trip settings.
It is not intended to be "looking down" but I really would suggest that some method of basic monitoring, whether it's that meter that lets you monitor current usage, a smartmeter or just monthly manual meter readings, isn't lack of personality but common sense.
With the smartmeter or the monitoring thing I had, you soon get to know what "normal" readings look like, and to recognise abnormal ones. For instance, if you have a base load of 500wH, or whatever, then that's what you'll use even if you're away, from things that are always on, like your fridge, freezer, PVR on standby, cordless phone base station and so on.
If it suddenly jumps by 3000w, and someone hasn't just done something to cause it, like boiling a kettle, then it should immediately cause you to wonder what the hell is going on. Like, is the immersion heater on constantly? If you're interested in cutting your bill generally, it can also help in identifying what devices use a surorising amount of unexpected power, like multiple older PCs on soft power down, or printers on 'standby'.
I think I have as much personality as most people, but a lifetime of running businesses where being aware of what things cost, certainly at a macro scale, is essential to maximising effifiency and sometimes even to basic profitability, so I just have that sort of analytical mindset.
As for your original question, no, costs haven't suddenly jumped vastly to my knowledge, but immersion heaters are horribly greedy of power, in much the way that bpiling that 3kW kettle constantly would be. I would have thought that a thermostat failure leaving the immersion heater running permanently would have resulted in a very noisy hot water tank, and a burnt out immersion element. But a faulty thermostat would well have it running much to long, consistent with your overly hot water, and consistent with a bill, of that sort of size. And if so, and you can't find a sound justification for the utility company being at fault, I'd guess you're stuck with the bill. 20/20 hindsight is wonderful, etc, but the lesson, in my opinion, is to take an occasional reading and make sure usage is at least broadly within expectations.
Soldato
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leaving chargers plugged in, not worth the pursuing that.i can plug in my super duper aukey high speed charger in and it doesnt make any difference to my smart meter reading at all. none. 10 of them might, maybe. but we'd be talking a watt or so. having my big plasma tv on in standby makes no difference to the reading either. nothing, zip.
Don't worry about stuff like that, it'll drive you crazy.
It's not a lie. something else happened. Something is either using more juice, or your unit costs increased.
How much was the cost of all that new gear? because you're going have to save that on the bills before you even break even... if you're doing this purely to reduce cost, then you might be going the wrong way about it....
as for checking readings and such, i would think just about everybody i know would submit their estimates and that's that, those that aren't already on smart meters anyway. When you get billed quarterly, for example, that does leave a window for something like an immersion heater to gobble up quite a lot of energy before anybody notices.
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Cheers James
Lights are always off when not in room, tv off, in fact now the only plug turned on in the entire house is the fridge freezer.
I spent quite a bit. Old man got mates rates on boiler (thank god he knows loadsa tradesman its saved me thousands over the years). All in all spent maybe around £900 on new stuff.
I don't class the TV with a ~1W rating on that either.
Will invest in one.
