Gas meter/usage question

[Hades]

I'm hoping we have some gas experts on the forum We recently had a massive gas bill in (around £800 for the quarter). Although it's winter and it is a big draughty house, this surprised us quite a bit. We recently had an engineer fix the boiler and it seems to have been since that time. So we have someone coming to recheck the boiler tomorrow.

We've been watching the gas meter reading for the last few days and it in about 30 mins we're using 3 or 4 units. This seems very high to me so until we get everything checked we're only using the heating sparingly.

I also noticed the following odd behaviour on the meter... while watching it, it occasionally changes so all the digits are 8 for about 2 seconds. Then it goes back to the previous reading and continues climbing. I'm trying to arrange for the meter to be tested (I know there is a charge for it) but that department is closed today.

So a couple of questions:

1) What is the average gas unit usage of a large house? I've been told it should be around 5 to 10 units per day. Is this correct?

2) Is the 88888 behaviour on the meter normal? I've never noticed that before.

Thanks.

 

[Hades]

Thanks all, especially Luw.

 

[Hades]

Thanks for the replies so far. We've had the boiler checked now and British Gas say everything is ok and we've also had Transco check the meter for leaks. What they won't do yet is actually check it for accuracy (but at least we've ruled out the boiler and leaks).

The metric/imperial meter issue does explain why our figures are so different to friends and neighbours. But we are still seeing some odd behaviour - when using only the heating for a period of time we have been seeing different usage. For example, yesterday we were seeing 1 metric unit every 10 mins. Today we are seeing 1 unit every 20 mins. That's for the same usage pattern and in roughly the same weather.

I would not expect to see that?