Not putting the heating on - how's it going...?

Electricity: £23.25 for December (combination of some solar but mostly battery storage).
Oil: Not sure. Probably about 2 litres / day, so £60-70 for heating and hot water.
No gas.

2L/day?!
Really?
😫

Can't be arsed to trawl back through various posts but, in response to one of my mine which referred to using experts, I wouldn't trust a middle ranking/middle class/middling ability IT 'manager' with my CH system any more than that they would trust me with their domestic IT set-up.
Molgrips has been a prolific poster - was your installation done by a plumber on a piece rate to complete an estate-wide target (think splash'n'dash in decorating terms) or was it by a specialist heating engineer?
If the former, which seems likely, you get what you pay for; it works - but inefficiently.
Your problem, not mine.

So you want me to try and find a specialist heating engineer to come out to my house and pay him to do.. what? Tune up my heating? It takes hours, essentially I'm trying to coerce a badly designed system to work as efficiently as I can. If you were a plumber, would you spend hours and hours trying out different settings, tweaking things measuring temperatures? If I asked for that service I'd get laughed at. Tradespeople don't do stuff like that. They'd go 'well mate this is crap you need a new boiler/a whole new system', and they might be right. But I simply haven't got five grand for that.

So why not learn how it works and figure out how to optimise it? Are you suggesting I'm not somehow capable? I suspect you are with this comment:

I wouldn’t trust a middle ranking/middle class/middling ability IT ‘manager’ with my CH system

Is that what you think I am? I do work in IT but I'm not a manager, or a "manager". My job is to diagnose and fix issues with systems. The ones I work on are software, not heating, but the software is MUCH more complicated than a domestic central heating system; the process of understanding and figuring out what's wrong and what can be done is pretty similar. So yeah I'm confident that I have the intelligence and aptitude to learn about what's in my house and improve matters. You don't think that - but I'm not sure why.

Do you pay people to do everything for you? You take your bike to a bike shop all the time? Do you pay a gardener? Do you pay a decorator to decorate? It must be nice to be that rich. You may have overlooked that this system was recently "serviced" by a well recommended plumber. I was expecting him to at least clean out the combustion chamber on my boiler, but he didn't. If he had he would have noticed how screwed up the system was. He didn't do any diagnostics other than put his hand on a radiator. On the other hand, over the last couple of months I've found and fixed several small faults and one major one, and tuned the system for much greater efficiency - and it's cost me less than £50 in tools and materials.

I've got the controller set to 18° for most of the daylight hours into mid evening, and 14° for nighttime. That seems to keep the house pretty tolerable.

November's dual-fuel bill was £170. December came in at just over £270, and we were away for the Christmas week (I'm sure I put the controller in 'holiday' mode at a low target temperature for 6 of those 7 days) so the cold 10 days or so in the early part of the month made a big difference in Dec.

17 feels a lot cooler when it's mild and damp than when it's cold, I reckon. I've put mine up a couple of degree since the cold weather - although obviously far less gas is burned in milder weather even with the increase.

frankconway
Full Member

Can’t be arsed to trawl back through various posts but, in response to one of my mine which referred to using experts, I wouldn’t trust a middle ranking/middle class/middling ability IT ‘manager’ with my CH system any more than that they would trust me with their domestic IT set-up.

But the premise of heating system installation has been dumbed down so far that even an ‘expert’ doesn’t actually know much about the system. With the 10 week wonder courses being so acutely targeted to achieve maximum compliance and pass rates, Dunning Kruger is rife!

As a professional cable muncher, it galls me every time I see a ‘central heating wiring centre’ (box of spaghetti with a strip of choc blocks). This could very easily and for not much extra cost be improved markedly, both in terms of neatness and electrical safety. It could even be made with proper push fit terminals that would claw back cost on install time - so a win win.

Now things have been made even worse by the advent of smart heating - no it ****ing isn’t smart or it would actually take control of the system properly rather than piggy backing off the thermostat!

Find me a tradesman who isn’t just someone with a bit of experience who is willing to have a go and I’ll bite your arm off…

So why not learn how it works and figure out how to optimise it? Are you suggesting I’m not somehow capable? I suspect you are with this comment:

Don't feed the troll. He's already called me an idiot further up the thread for living in a cold house without knowing the first thing about my financial situation.

I put X400 cleaner in the system and the instructions say to leave it running on full for 2hrs, so I put it up to 20C and turned up the flow. It's now 22C upstairs and I'm roasting. How do people live like this?

How do people live like this?

I have no idea. I was staying with my dad over Christmas and he left the heating on one night by mistake. I woke up in the middle of the night absolutely roasting and that was 'only' 18°C!

As a professional cable muncher, it galls me every time I see a ‘central heating wiring centre’ (box of spaghetti with a strip of choc blocks)

I’ve lived in three houses with S-plan systems. All have been wired in this style of zero care. Pretty sure the plumber has been told which colour goes where without any actual understanding of how the system actually works.

All three occasions I’ve ripped it out and re-done it with a semblance of neatness and order. Choc blocks are the work of the devil and should have been banned years ago.

You can get 20-way boxes that make the whole thing a lot easier to both install and understand, including some that take Wago connectors.

I would never trust a plumber to do anything electrical. It makes a mockery of the fact that they get signed off for gas boilers and unvented systems but don’t actually understand how it’s controlled.

It's a strange position to take, a bit of learning and understanding of something goes a long way.
Before the big price hikes I dind't pay much mind to my boiler.. I just set the temp on the stat, with two on/off periods a day and that was that.

But after a bit of learning I've fine tuned my flow temp, TRV's and HW temp and I'm undoubtably burning less gas with no 'quality of life' sacrifices.

Yes my bills are higher but thats because prices are outstripping pretty much any efficiency gains the end user makes - but i'm certainly paying less then I would be if I just stuck my head in the sand.

Currently im running a set back temp of 15c, but will boost it to 19c for an hour or two, but it becomes too warm and stuffy after a while.
I've no idea how folk can run at 21c or 22c...

Computers are an interesting analogy to boilers - they both have an air of myserious wizzardry about them to the layman, but a bit of learning and knowledge, and the misty veil clears and things are often less complex than they first seem when you have no understanding of a particular system or piece of hardware.

You could even use cars as an anology... the amount of people who don't know how to do an oil change, or even check the oil properly, or fit a spare tyre is pretty shocking.

Was doing pretty well in reducing has consumption by installing some tado kit, and have been experimenting with different schedules and temps. Was down to 60kWh/day average in December which is half of last years.
Had boiler running happily at 50 flow temp, so making some savings there too.
17 year old boiler has found the ultimate energy saving solution tho and has died, so consumption is now 0kWh

EPC calculation reckoned my house as i received it in 2012 should be using £2700 of oil...... - baring in mind that the oil price has significantly risen in that time.

we have over time insulated and improved our way down to >£1000 this year......

id like to see that down to £500 by ditching the oil hot water.

IFTTT didnt work yesterday so my house stayed on away mode all night unknown to me...... but no one noticed even though it was -1 outside. The insulation upstairs is working.

Solar is on the up and up./ its the 10th of jan and we already produced more than december full month. - solar really is incredible for 10 months of the year.....

A question, and I think this is the right thread, which I am struggling to explain.

Regarding energy prices and them being dictated by a global market:

- how come petrol and diesel, also bought on a global market ahead of time, has such a variation from country to country even after tax is removed? The prices also seem to be less volatile in the current situation.

- can a country, region or even individual town or village create a smaller market, an energy cost independence if you will? It seems that this ought to be a goal of more and more places?

– can a country, region or even individual town or village create a smaller market, an energy cost independence if you will? It seems that this ought to be a goal of more and more places?

I believe France wanted to cap energy price rises with legislation this as the current crisis took hold, but swiftly learned that they couldn't dodge global market forces. So they ended up subsidising a price cap.

Socialised energy is a different matter, either on a local or national level it should be possible - and even desirable - but I suspect the build cost for nuke stations, wind farms etc. are subsidised by promising the firms involved a slice of future profits.

Some woman im Wales orgamised a village funded turbine iirc.
She was pn the new years honors list

I haven't posted on the thread in a while. My heating's working really well with a higher flow rate and a lower temp still.

how come petrol and diesel, also bought on a global market ahead of time, has such a variation from country to country even after tax is removed?

Could be many reasons - demand, also subsidies (I think diesel is subsidised in many places) and I think that if you have refineries with a particular product then that product is cheaper, they may get crude from different places and refine different amounts. I seem to remember reading that fuel is cheaper closer to refineries in the UK so that suggests distribution costs are a factor.

can a country, region or even individual town or village create a smaller market, an energy cost independence if you will? It seems that this ought to be a goal of more and more places?

They have to buy their energy from somewhere unless it's renewable.

id like to see that down to £500 by ditching the oil hot water.

I'm not sure you'll do that quite, but it depends on a couple of variables.

To take a 200L tank of water from 12c to 55c requires 10Kw energy - lets be generous and say you use 2L of oil to achieve that (it's probably less as 1L of oil contains about 10Kw of energy) for 6 months of the year*.
(180 * 2) * 80p/L = £288

It's good but not £500.

* It's doubtful that you'd be heating the full tank from 12c every day so the starting temp would probably be higher thus requiring less KwH/oil to heat it.

I’ve got a combi with an onboard 40l tank currently not an external tank

It (up till lst month ) fired 3mins every 90 mins all it’s life + hot water demand

My heating was off from April to October and I still got through a significant amount of oil due to the bairns baths

Replacing the hot water side with a 250l tank and solar thermal + manual change over.

This lets me ditch the electric shower while retaining redundancy

I'm sick of feeling cold.  Thats how its going for me!  I'm trying to be economical but I hate feeling cold!

I’m sick of feeling cold. Thats how its going for me! I’m trying to be economical but I hate feeling cold!

Wear more clothes! I've had my heating on 4 times this winter, max of 1 hour each time.

It (up till lst month ) fired 3mins every 90 mins all it’s life + hot water demand

That sounds rediculous - 48 mins every day would probably heat a 250L tank (depending on your boiler size)!

Anyone else had their latest bill from she'll normally it's 5th of the month, nothing so far when I log into my account

Anyone else had their latest bill from she’ll normally it’s 5th of the month, nothing so far when I log into my account

Not had the bill from shell yet,but do know that it will be about £750 ,ouch.

That sounds rediculous – 48 mins every day would probably heat a 250L tank (depending on your boiler size)!

Quite probably . But I don't have a 250l tank to heat so it's academic.

Is a 5kw battery enough for. Pv set up?
I drain an everage of 200w an hr according to octopus. That's not really trying to not use electricity.
Some floating around on ebay at affordable prices.

5kwh is more like a capacitor to allow you to fully utilise the solar generated.

You'll not be charging at night and lasting all day on that if that's your plan

But it's a perfectly workable size if your intention is to be able to put the washing machine on without the sun nipping behind a cloud on a sunny day and you drawing from the grid.

Anyone else had their latest bill from she’ll normally it’s 5th of the month

Nope. I messaged them and apparently "your account has a fault, we've asked our technical team to sort..."

Clearly not just my account with a fault.

Sister got me a SHO oversized sherpa fleece hoodie blanket thing at xmas, and ive not had it off since i got it. Really warm, fluffy lining and big fluffy lined through pocket on the front.

Teyre about £15 on Amazon. Well worth it.

Aka . House coat.

Mrs t-r has one. Just about balances us out. Her in her house coat and me in my tee and shorts.....house at 17.

and ive not had it off since i got it.

Ruined your sex life then ?
I'll get mi coat !

Aka . House coat.

^tj earlier.We should start a freezing cold fashion discussion.

Just got Decembers bill, £190 for electric and gas.

I'm calling that a win for the efficiency savings on a 4-bed detached!

Thermostats on 17.5C 6am till 8pm as OH works from home.

New stuff this winter:
Rads all balanced
Boiler output temp set to ~63C so the HW cylinder can get to 55C, return is 50ish. This doesn't seem to change with pump speed so I suspect it's modulating to only ever have a ~12C dT.
HW comes on an hour before the heating and a couple of other hours during the day so that it's not pumping cooler CH water through the hot cylinder and wasting energy.
Pump set to minimum speed.
Cavity walls insulated.
Loft hatch properly insulated.
Most of the TRV's are set to 2 which seems to be ~16.5C and the doors closed, the rest are set to 3 (~17.5C) or 4 (the one on the non-window side of the living room so that one stays on longer in the evening than the one under the window blocked by curtains).

Other stuff:
70's brick built house, half arsed loft conversion where they've boarded it out and put more insulation and plasterboard on the 'roof' to make it a vaguely useable space. No idea how much actual insulation there is though. Ground floor is always cold underfoot as it's hardwood flooring laid straight onto concrete.

Not had the bill from shell yet,

Just spoken to Shell via chat, and apparently I won't be getting a bill until the beginning of February due to the tariff change on 1st January. I'm guessing this is the same for everyone with the same billing period. I know my mate is on the same billing cycle as I am.

@thisisnotaspoon - how many people living in that house if you don't mind my asking? (Our HW comes straight via combi - no HW tanks for us.)

Is a 5kw battery enough for. Pv set up?

I have a 5.2 kWh battery with solar. If you're an energy skinflint you'll need to draw from the grid in December / January.

Mine charges from the grid at off-peak hours and then supplies the house from 4.30am onwards. This covers breakfast, lots of lighting, heating (oil) for 2 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the evening, either the washing machine or tumble dryer, and a simple evening meal in a small oven. There's also a boiling water tap which is on during the day.

Beyond those times the sun provides enough energy to top the battery up during the day regardless of what you do, and April - October the sun is bright enough that no overnight charging is needed.

So while I could get another 2.4 kWh it's a bit pointless when it's only needed 90 days a year at worst, and even then can only save 81p/day.

👏 @thisisnotaspoon love that, and I don't feel so bad about our usage given there's 4 of us

My December bill increased by another 25% as I used a bit more heating for that one week of cold snap.

Cooking with electric cooker is expensive but somehow this seems to be the favourite for rental property. I am thinking of getting my landlord to switch it to gas but I doubt he would entertain such idea for safety etc.

Cooking with electric cooker is expensive

This is eye-wateringly expensive. So much so, I'm even looking at sodding air-fryers now. 😭

This is eye-wateringly expensive. So much so, I’m even looking at sodding air-fryers now.

Not bad a bill from shell but they've done something when my meter readings as they allowed me to reduce my DD (it has been at the bottom of the allowed range). So they've done use calcs I guess.

We have a combo microwave, you can do oven stuff with part microwave part heat much faster than an oven and it stays just as crispy.

Or just cook things that don't need the oven.

molgrips

We have a combo microwave, you can do oven stuff with part microwave part heat much faster than an oven and it stays just as crispy.

Or just cook things that don’t need the oven.

Only use the oven once a week now to cook a whole lot of stuff then freeze/fridge it so its either microding or stir-fry for the rest of the week. Have found that shutting myself in my little office with project work means I can leave the heating off all day and its still toasty in here. Going to my girlfriends place at the weekend saves a whole lot on heating but I do treat her by spending on quality ingredients and cooking for her in return 😀

I did laugh reading a forum post elsewhere about getting a bigger girl for the winter "get one with a higher tog rating" 😉 then someone suggested that should be "higher tug rating"!