Now that I finally had a few days off work, I arranged for an electrician to come around and visit. He inspected everything in the property, all usage, and the meter etc itself.
The conclusion was:
- no faulty appliances or dodgy circuits
- Just significant number of appliances plugged in and constantly drawing power, including fridges, freezers, microwaves, washer/dryer, anything with an LED display or lights that's constantly on, TVs, computers and monitors on standby/sleep mode.
- I was advised to try and turn anything that's not actively being used off from the socket at the wall.
- The biggest draw and probably reason for increase in baseline since October is our new plumbing/plant room with pumps, boilers, water tanks, etc constantly circulating hot water for usage throughout the house. When boiler room all turned off, drop from 1.2 -> 0.6kW. Obviously nothing we can do about this as we need hot water.
- Just by going around the house and turning some things off from the sockets e.g. dryers and cookers we decreased baseline from 1.2kW to 1.0kW. That seems like a tiny difference because it's only 7p per hour, but £0.07 x 24 x 365 = £613 saving annually which is a huge amount.
I also notice that Octopus Tracker is going consistently up in price due to what seems to be poor electricity generation? I'm thinking of shifting to a different tarriff, like Intelligent Octopus Go, although I can't work out if that cheap night time rate is only for car charging or for all usage between 23:30 and 05:30.
So the thread has climaxed with a realisation that you do indeed just have a load of stuff using leccy in your house. I'm not sure how I feel about my time investment into this thread now.
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