£1.20 per hour to use central heating... a lot?
I've just put my central heating in my new flat for the first time and it's costing me a little over £1.20 an hour.
Now, sorry but that seems nightmarishly high. Am I right or am I just not living with the times?
I know this because the old tenants had a meter installed which I am having removed,but even still, that's outrageously expensive.
Isn't it?
Now, sorry but that seems nightmarishly high. Am I right or am I just not living with the times?
I know this because the old tenants had a meter installed which I am having removed,but even still, that's outrageously expensive.
Isn't it?
0
Comments
Thanks. I'm going to go out now for a dog walk and come back in an hour and see where we're at!
If it's still the same, something needs doing. My last house wasn't nearly this outrageous!
Do they have timer clocks on them? You could adjust then carefully if so
It would indeed be outrageously expensive but frankly, it's not credible.
How have you established that it is costing you more than £1.20 per hour?
With a flat I'd expect it to be far less due to the other flats partially heating/insulating you.
But it reached optimum room temp so has been off for a little part of that two hours.
Still, crazy high. I can hear the gas meter whirring away when it's on like there's a hamster on a wheel in there!
When I bought this place, there was an electric and gas token meter in here. While I was waiting for the meters to get swapped over I was using the cards that had been left by the previous occupant to put credit on the meter. It turned out that there was debt attached to the meters, and every time I put credit on I was actually paying their debt off. Thankfully this was sorted out when I called to get the meters swapped over, but it took me a week to get around to it and it seemed like all the credit was getting swallowed up by their debt.
The meters also have charges on them and this is deducted from your credit periodically. Depending on your tariff/supplier these charges can vary so check it's not down to that.
I've never seen one before so hopefully you can help
I put on 20 quid and it put the lot on, although I'm going to get it removed as it's outrageously expensive (and I mean I put the gas fire on 3 (out of 5) and it uses about £1.50 a day, which is just insane.
So, how would I know?
Thanks to everyone for responding! I'm just drying some towels on the radiators and the meter is whizzing around. I've never heard of anything like this before. And the daily standing charge is about 40p, which is also crazy.
When you have your meter swapped make sure the engineer gives you something that records how much credit is left on the meter by the way, and keep the receipts for everything you've paid on it so far. The unused credit should be credited to your next bill, but sometimes they forget to do it so you need to keep hold of the meter readings and how much was left in money before the swap over.
If you're waiting a couple of weeks to get your meters (as I was), ring up your supplier and ask them to send a code through for the card/token. They'll give you a choice of shops near you that can handle the transaction and (at least they did with the electricity) give you a code to take to the shop with you. This code 'resets' the card/key and then when you next put it in the meter it resets any debt it's been told to take off each period and lets it know you're a 'new' owner.
Hope this helps.
The OP has already said he/she has a pay as you go meter. It makes it incredibly easy to keep track of..
This reminds me, a few years ago one of my cousins was putting £10 a day on their gas meter.
It was an old 3 bedroom end terrace with next to no insulation and even one of the panels of the back door was missing (just replaced with cardboard).
So it's perfectly possible.
Did they do simple tricks like putting tin foil behind their radiators and "shrink wrap" the windows ?
Retired Plumber/Heating Expert. Check your Lockshieid Radiator Valves, if they are all wide open the system needs adjusting. You can save over 25% on fuel consumption with a properly adjusted system. I was Senior Technical Representative for a major boiler manufacturer and without exaggeration at least 95% of systems I visited over a 14yr period were not adjusted at all ,hence my visits.
Without adjustment, what happens to that 33% extra heat? Doesn't it all contribute to heating the house anyway? (Unless all the heat is concentrated in one upstairs room with the door shut.)
Then the thermostat, if correctly placed, would shut off the heat sooner.
If there is no thermostat, but just TRVs (IME totally impossible to control the temperature of the house with), then fitting one would be a priority over messing with radiator valves which will only start leaking when you try turning them.
I could never afford it if it was charging me that much an hour.
There are only three feasible explanations :
1. You have a gas leak (unlikely as you would surely be able to smell it)
2. Your meter is faulty
3. As others have suggested, there is an oustanding debt run up by the previous occupant which is swallowing up a large part of the sums you are adding.
I've never used a PAYG meter (in fact I don't recall ever seeing one) but regardless of what the meter indicates, you simply cannot actually be using the quantity of gas implied by the £1.20 per hour which you mentioned in your opening post .
If you used your heating for 12 hours per day (not untypical in the winter months), this would equate to £432 per month and even in the most poorly insulated property with an extremely inefficient boiler, this is vanishingly unlikely.
Why can't it be £1.20 per hour? Don't forget this is just for the first hour or so where the boiler could be working continuously.
The OP should have measured the actual consumption in m3, to eliminate the vagaries of whatever tariff is being used.
I've just turned on my CH, and it seems to be using gas at about 1.33m3 per hour, or 15kWh per hour, or about 50p per hour at my cheapish tariff which excludes the standing charge.
The OP hasn't even mentioned if it was gas! But it might be a higher tariff and/or it might be a more powerful boiler. And over a period of one or two hours, the quality of the insulation is not going to make any difference; the windows and doors could all be wide open with a gale blowing in from the artic, but the consumption will be dominated by the fixed kW rating of the boiler.
Because the figures simply don't make sense - see below.
I don't think that boilers do work continuously even from a cold start, but I'm willing to be corrected on this.
Agreed - this would be a far better measure.
So using the 12 hour per day model that I suggested, this would equate to £180 per month plus your standing charge of £?? (mine is £7.50 per month).
Do you really think that the OP will be using almost two and a half times more gas than you do to heat his flat, even if (as is likely) he has a more expensive tariff and an inefficent boiler? I don't ...
See post #10.
Fair comment.
What I meant was that poor insulation and an inefficient boiler would contribute to a higher monthly bill because it would probably result in the boiler being run for longer and/or at a higher temperature than would otherwise be the case.
Starting with a very cold house, it could feasibly take more than an hour, but I haven't done any experiments to confirm that.