Not putting the heating on – how’s it going…?

So they’ve set a tariff way higher than the capped rate and use the government money to bring it down to the capped level? That doesn’t seem right. Surely you have a capped unit rate and then the government money comes off that? Have I mis understood (more than likely)

My take is they are showing you the actual market rate, before the government support, then deducting that and showing you the net – so you can see you are actually getting the ‘cap’ applied.

Also, if you use a vast amount, my understanding is that only so many kWh would get the support and some units would be at the raw market rate as the ‘cap’ only covers the average house hold.

Also, if you use a vast amount, my understanding is that only so many kWh would get the support and some units would be at the raw market rate as the ‘cap’ only covers the average house hold.

The cap sets the maximum unit rate, nothing else*, and is the same no matter how much you use.

*oh maybe standing charge too

Interesting, a colleague runs a whole load of servers in his garage for work (as we got caught our mid office move in lockdown) and he has to stay below a certain threshold else his supplier classes him as business and not domestic and changes the pricing and VAT.

So we try and keep as much as possible switched off and just phone him up to ask him to power up a rack if I need to use the kit on it, then shut it off when I’m done.

Just had an almight shock – i was running very healthy surplus before winter -well it’s all gone..

Jan’s figures -Electricity

Day = 657kwh @39.82
Night = 135kwh @23.81

Gas = 4287.4kwh @9.8

so 320 and 450 quid respectively.

edit – cos it was rubbish.. it works out at double the elecy usage, primarily becuase the cabin is now being lived in, but gas is through the roof (but thats the main house and my issue)..

footflaps
Full Member
Interesting, a colleague runs a whole load of servers in his garage for work (as we got caught our mid office move in lockdown) and he has to stay below a certain threshold else his supplier classes him as business and not domestic and changes the pricing and VAT.

So we try and keep as much as possible switched off and just phone him up to ask him to power up a rack if I need to use the kit on it, then shut it off when I’m done

ooft, how is the Business Resilience Plan with that setup ? 🙂

Gas = 4287.4kwh @9.8

Bloody hell, that’s 2.5 times what I use in a year 🙁

simondbarnes
Full Member
Gas = 4287.4kwh @9.8

Bloody hell, that’s 2.5 times what I use in a year 🙁

expected yearly usage according to bulb 22340 kWh

wth am i doing..? 🙁

wth am i doing..? 🙁

Big, leaky house? Living in shorts n tee?

I wear 7 million layers and live under a blanket in winter but obviously that’s not for everyone.

expected yearly usage according to bulb 22340 kWh

wth am i doing..? 🙁

My yearly average is 13000 kWh for gas. 2300 kWh for leccy.

2 bed, decently insulated victorian semi, and a log burner for back-up.

These are my January daily wholesale prices with the cap. they deduct 17ppkwh so if you add back the 17p against each rate, none of them are near the 65.53ppkwh on footflaps bill for the same period.

Just had an almight shock – i was running very healthy surplus before winter -well it’s all gone..

Jan’s figures -Electricity

Day = 657kwh @39.82
Night = 135kwh @23.81

Gas = 4287.4kwh @9.8

so 320 and 450 quid respectively.

edit – cos it was rubbish.. it works out at double the elecy usage, primarily becuase the cabin is now being lived in, but gas is through the roof (but thats the main house and my issue)..

My goodness – that’s a heck of a lot of energy!

Almost double our combined Grid+Solar and 4x our Oil usage (in kwh equivalent) And that’s with an EV, someone at home most days, a wife that lives in the shower or at the end of a hairdryer and two kids who simply can’t switch things off in a 4 bed house in an exposed location with slightly dodgy windows!

I wear 7 million layers and live under a blanket in winter but obviously that’s not for everyone.

I am sat (admitedly in shorts), with a blanket over my legs and a hat on indoors…

Still spent £225 last month!

Also, if you use a vast amount, my understanding is that only so many kWh would get the support and some units would be at the raw market rate as the ‘cap’ only covers the average house hold.

The £2500 ‘cap’ (actually energy price guarantee) is a misnomer. That’s based on a fictitious average household, based on their usage the bill would be £2500. If you use more than this average house, you’ll pay more. The rate doesn’t change at this cut off – there is no cut off.

OFGEN set a cap which is the maximum amount suppliers can charge for their energy on a per kwh basis which the results in a theoretical max price (again based on a standard household). It’s higher than the EPG. If you use more then you’ll pay more than the current £4279. The suppliers can sell their units for less, but not more. The market’s supposed to regulate what the charge, if someone’s overcharging – move supplier.

Right now the Gov is paying the difference between the supplier market rate and the EPG rate to the suppliers for us.

Then in addition the Gov is ALSO giving us all £400 towards whatever our bill is. That comes off your bill if you pay it (monthly / quarterly / whatever), or if you pay by monthly DD it’s applied as a credit.

This last bit is wrong IMHO, that’s going to every household from the richest to the poorest and that relief should be aimed at those that need it most.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-bills-support/energy-bills-support-factsheet-8-september-2022

simondbarnes
Full Member
wth am i doing..? 🙁

Big, leaky house? Living in shorts n tee?

I wear 7 million layers and live under a blanket in winter but obviously that’s not for everyone.

ita a fair old size house (5000sqfeet chalet style), but it’s new and well insulated – except the bifold doors which seem to grow and shrink at an incredible rate during the year. that said, when it was a poxy little bungalow, i actually saved money for the first few years after i re-built it as the old place was atrocious.

I know the tumble dryer is a big issue in our house, but gas seems way over.

i keep saying i want to sell up and downsize, its a souless funny shaped box.

Not putting the heating on – how’s it going…?

Extremely well for Shell, it seems.

I know the tumble dryer is a big issue in our house, but gas seems way over.

Might not be the case, however, we discovered we had a gas leak at the meter when we had a new cooker installed. We’d lived in the house for 8 years!! The gas engineer fitting the cooker discovered it when he was doing the ‘tests’ they do when fitting a new appliance. It was a test nipple that was loose and reckoned we’d been venting gas for a long time. The meter is outside and wasn’t bad enough we’d ever noticed. I did, however, notice a drop in gas usage after he’d sorted it. (That was way before this current energy cost issue so financially hadn’t really registered at the time.)

190 kWh Electric and 1405 kWh Gas here for January (3 bed semi, no cavity wall ins, 2 adults both wfh, Combi boiler, Wiser installed)

Only been here since May, and sadly our fix (28.41p/kWh, 51.63 s/c electric, 7.48p/kWh, 27.22 s/c gas) ends in a month. But circa £700 in credit.

When we moved, they projected our use as 28,000 kWh Gas per year! When questioned they couldn’t provide sound reasoning for that, and we agreed for our DD to be set against UK average of 12,000 kWh Gas and 2900 kWh Electric. Our projected annual use stated on last bill is 1430 kWh Electric and 8700 kWh Gas which doesn’t feel too bad.

Solar panels would be of interest, but not worth it at our low usage? Perhaps if they ever create a small efficient electric car we’d switch cars and it’d make more sense?

This last bit is wrong IMHO

Surely it’s all wrong? Government are paying energy companies tons of money and they are making huge profits. How does it make sense?

January’s results are in. All usage less than half last year, sadly costing double.

Good effort!

our autumn/winter quarter payment was £ for £ the same as last year – MrSaLiAS is most unimpressed as since last year #2son isnt here, her daily morning hot shower has been swapped out for a wash and no electric heating (underfloor and/or panel heater) has been used at all.

finally ran out of the scavenged Cherry wood and paid for the first load of dry/mixed logs of the year, up from £100 to £125 🙁

Still chilli outside but the wonders of solar gain are back. Currently 23 degrees in the upstairs bedroom (double south facing window ) and 20 in the downstairs.

Thanks to deep eaves when the sun gets a bit higher we lose the solar gain on downstairs and it is much cooler than outside.

Just had a message from Bulb saying that prices are going up from 28th Feb but “won’t be a steep as originally thought”.    Funny how they won’t let me be in debt but it was OK to hold my money for the few short months my credit lasted.

Good effort!

Well what I’m wondering is, yes we’ve been ‘tight’ on CH usgae, but what the hell were we doing with the leccy??

Edit: thinking about it, that’s barely using the tumble dryer, smart plugs on all TVs, all light bulbs now LED (although most were already). The electric shower (replaced with bathroom revamp for mixer shower of the CH) can’t have been using that much surely????

I’ve not had my central heating on for the last 16 days. Had the wood burner lit a few times. House is hovering around 10°c, sunshine is helping out a bit but the windows are E/W and the gable end is North facing.

My intention is to insulate the walls around the windows with insulated plasterboard which should help a fair bit when next winter arrives.

170 m3 of gas used this month. It’s going to be expensive.  Feels like a lot but we pay for what we use, so that’s offset by it being about £20/mo during the summer.

It wont be this summer though.

It wont be this summer though.

Our heating’s always off during the summer, heatwave or no.

We went to our place by the beach this weekend for a change of scene.  Turned the oil heating down at home and saved about £25 in oil….. offset by the 90kWh of electricity we used heating the other place Friday evening to Sunday lunchtime!

The place there is upside down so the living room/kitchen and main bedroom are upstairs which was the only bit we heat – so it was 17c upstairs and 11 downstairs!!

Thankfully we’re in a decent amount of credit with the supplier there and still on a lowish fixed rate until October (21p/kWh)

Isnt that mindset a little bit like ‘ i don’t worry about the price of petrol, as I only ever put in £20’

Not really….it’s really bloody expensive!

as per my other thread about cavity wall insulation (decided it wasnt worth the risk), This weekend I topped up the insulation in the loft.

The majority of the loft had 10cm of insulation fitted by one of the previous owners probably in the mid 80s, I added 20cm to this. There was also a small difficult to access section of roof above the bathroom that had no insulation at all , its probably 5m square in surface area, so I got my son to squeeze under the main beam and put about 30cm of insulation in here.

I’ll see what sort of difference it has made over the coming days, but its hard to tell whether any change is because of changes to the outside temperature, or due to the increase in insulation, but in the 7 days leading up to fitting the new insulation we used on average 131kwh of gas per day, and since fitting the new stuff (I only have 2 days worth of data so far) we have used an average of 109kwh per day. Will wait and see what the data shows, but hopefully it has made a significant difference.

Next step will be to get a new boiler fitted to replace the one from 1992.

so I got my son to squeeze under the main beam and put about 30cm of insulation in here.

Sounds like Victorian working practices……

Chimney sweep anyone?

Sounds like Victorian working practices……

Chimney sweep anyone?

I did suggest he take it up as a career.

Its ok though, he wasnt exploited, the little bugger charged me 60 quid for the job.

Sharkbait, X post. I was referring to moly and his offsetting winter against summer bills.
Julians. Ensure you buy a boiler with a high modulating ratio. 1:15 or greater if possible.. This seems to be the least worse scenario for having to run the heating and it not bankrupting you

Sharkbait, X post.

Doh!

So, new boiler installed today (combi) which has a digital display for adjusting the temps of HW and CH. I will be interested to see if fine tuning it makes any difference – the old one just had a printed scale so no real idea what the CH temp was. I could test the water temp at the tap but hopefully this will allow some proper tweaking of temps…

Had my gas bill through for the 1st quarter – £95. Twice what it was for the previous quarter, I’ve obviously been too extravagant 🙁
On the plus side, being frugal with my leccy I’ve still got £190ish on my PAYG smart meter of the £400 the government gave out so shouldn’t have to top that up for a while.

Had my gas bill through for the 1st quarter – £95.

#humblebrag

🙂

#humblebrag

Hardly. My house hasn’t been above 12°C all winter and my bill is twice what my previous one was.