Energy

[White Room]

2 bed house with 2 of us gas and elec £74 a month

 

[andy8758]

Dan, it is well worth taking a long hard look at your overall energy consumption - 2 people in a 3 bed house should be able to reduce consumtpion to at least half what you are paying.

The obvious and cheap solutions first - replace all light bulbs with energy efficient bulbs, at least 200mm of loft insulation. Then look at heating system - do you have a programmer that allows you to set different times for each day? could you upgrade to a zonal system? Also can you reduce the times the water heater/central heating is on? What type of heating system do you have - a modern condenser/combi could halve your water heating costs (you only heat what you consume - British Gas had a special offer recently - an upgrade for £1400 - about the same as your energy bill for 1 quarter.

Look at your energy consumption habits - how often you use oven, how hot your wash is set, and how often it is used, do you use a tumble dryer? Dishwashers are also expensive - it is cheaper to buy an extra set of crockery/cutlery and only use it every other day! The reality of energy companies is that at any one time one may be cheaper than another - but it never lasts long! However your energy company will test your metering for free to check it is working /recording correctly.

Finally you could consider the costly and intrusive stuff like wall insulation, door and window replacement, self generation system installation - the list is long and can be quite expensive (I was present whilst a salesman quoted a customer £14,000 to install solar panels to a 3 bed cottage!

I appreciate that you may have already gone down this route, but something appears to be very wrong with your energy costs.

 

[Deleted member 9966]

we're paying about £80 a month for gas and leccy combined, 3 bed detached, 2 of us plus the dog. our heating is now off and only boosted for an hour or so if it gets really cold in the evenings. when the heating is on, we set the thermostat to around 12 degrees.

we're not getting the best deal though because we're on LGT for the gas because the gas line is not owned by national grid.

 

[Scott]

12 degrees! that arctic conditions, the inside of the house shouldnt get to that temp for the age of your house unless you ahve the windows open Liz!

 

[Deleted member 9966]

12 degrees! that arctic conditions, the inside of the house shouldnt get to that temp for the age of your house unless you ahve the windows open Liz!

just cos it says 12 degrees on the thermostat Scott, doesn't actually mean that's what it's heating the room too. There is a problem somewhere between the thermostat and the boiler as no matter what temperature we set the thermostat to, the boiler never kicks off when it reaches that temperature. so we keep the temps low to stop overheating the house. I'll be mentioning it to our gas engineer this summer when comes to service the boiler, but it always seems to work properly for him when he's here. we even changed the thermostat control, but it didn't help.

 

[kilty55]

think ours is 80 a month for both combined scottish power i changed to brit gas and another one before and had nothing but hasslr scot power seems to be the best i have found