thanks for the explanation, and the link - looks like it's £107 for each radiator - might be cheaper to just let the rad's come on earlier?
It can be surprising how much difference changes can make, 5 or 6 years ago I replaced the manual TRV valves on my radiators with "smart" ones, cost me nearly 300 for them and I wondered how long it would take to pay for them, but my next bill was 400 less than the previous few years. Maybe that was a particularly mild winter, but I don't recall it being so.
Of course with the rising costs of energy since they have gone up and last years bill has just come in and is 750 more then that low.
I am also on a communal heating system, all the buildings in the suburb I live in (or at least those built since the 1980's) have to be connected to it, unfortunately it is a bit more expensive than more traditional individual building solutions but is meant to be better environmentally. I was hoping that it might be a bit more insulated from the rising energy cost, as I think they a chunk of the energy comes from burning waste, but that is not proving to be the case.
https://www.entega.ag/geschaeftsfelder/netze/fernwaermenetz/
There is talk of them adding some sort of heat pump to the system, not sure I understand how that would work on such a scale as I believe that the connections from the source to the buildings is high temperatures and that the buildings have some sort of heat exchange instead of boilers.