Energy bill increases

[Mike_P]

It was range of cooking instructions I was quoting, the carrots bring the 6 mins .

 

[Alex321]

Article in a few papers yesterday saying that there is legislation going through allowing energy companies to make smart meters sending updates every 30 minutes the default.
You can opt out and make it different e.g. once a day.
This, as the articles say , leads into having the price change depending on the time of day.
Hence - at peak times the price can be raised to give people an incentive to use less then - then at times of lower demand the price can be lowered to encourage people to use more .

When I was with Octopus (or Bulb - I forget) I had a message saing that they were looking at this - and in the extreme they could even end up paying you to use excess electricity at times when the generation was there but no-one wqas using it - e.e. if the nuclear power stations are on idle they still produce electricity but in the middle of the night no-one is using it.
One concept was that you could potentially charge your car up and get paid to do it!!

Seems like a good idea to some extent - but it would make life more complicated for people - and some people don;t have a lot of choices about what they can do when.



Also - to be cynical (what me - surely not!!) you have to suspect someone in the energy company is looking at this and wondering how they can 'leverage' (i.e. use) this to increase profits without it looking like they are putting prices up!

That is the way the Octopus Agile tariff works - they have gone beyond "looking at it" now. And they also have a similar outgoing tariff for those with solar or other generating capacity.

But the incoming tariff is capped at 35p/KwH and most of the time recently it has been sitting at that. The outgoing tariff has no such cap, and has often been more than 35p recently.

 

[aferris2]

I've just received a reply to my query about the current variable rate charges from Scotish Power. Aparently I have to wait until the next bill arrives to find out. Wow, thanks!
I've suggested that I pay what my smart meter is showing (given that it still hasn't updated the rates since November (I write these things down...)

 

[icowden]

Bulb are still pretty good. I'm estimated £203 for gas and electric for a 4 bed house for April. Switching to variable tariff seems to have made a big difference. winter months are estimated at £350-£400 a month with the new prices which is a bit painful but could be a bit misleading as they seem to be reflecting my account balance rather than power usage, but could be a new projected cost based on usage and current prices.

That said, the estimates are probably based on previous usage. Hot water is now restricted to early mornings and evenings only and thermostat has been lowered by a degree during the day and 4 degrees at night - so that will help a bit on the gas front.

 

[MrGrumpy]

Have you just switched to variable ? I’m still in a fixed deal till Sept but fear similar monthly out goings on energy.

 

[icowden]

Have you just switched to variable ? I’m still in a fixed deal till Sept but fear similar monthly out goings on energy.

Seems to be an automatic switch triggered by changing my smart meter readings to every 30 minutes.

 

[gbb]

Bulb are still pretty good. I'm estimated £203 for gas and electric for a 4 bed house for April. Switching to variable tariff seems to have made a big difference. winter months are estimated at £350-£400 a month with the new prices which is a bit painful but could be a bit misleading as they seem to be reflecting my account balance rather than power usage, but could be a new projected cost based on usage and current prices.

That said, the estimates are probably based on previous usage. Hot water is now restricted to early mornings and evenings only and thermostat has been lowered by a degree during the day and 4 degrees at night - so that will help a bit on the gas front.

I can't definitevely say i'm right but here's what i found many years ago (following a discussion at work, comparing hot water left on all the time vs timed periods)
At that time, we always switched ours on early afternoon, nice hot water for the evening baths.
Colleague said this is wrong, you should leave it on all the time, that way you're only trickling in heat to keep a tank hot.

So i spent a month, reading the gas meter daily under our normal regime.
Then spent a month with the hot water left on permanently, reading the meter daily.

We used less gas with the latter. I have left our on ever since.

 

[mjr]

I can't definitevely say i'm right but here's what i found many years ago (following a discussion at work, comparing hot water left on all the time vs timed periods)
At that time, we always switched ours on early afternoon, nice hot water for the evening baths.
Colleague said this is wrong, you should leave it on all the time, that way you're only trickling in heat to keep a tank hot.

So i spent a month, reading the gas meter daily under our normal regime.
Then spent a month with the hot water left on permanently, reading the meter daily.

We used less gas with the latter. I have left our on ever since.

The big question mark there, of course, the weather. Was it warming or cooling between the two months?

I'd expect keeping it hot even when not needed to use more energy because a hotter tank cools more (it's proportional to the difference in temperature to the outside) and there will also be more heat lost in the trip around the pipes because the tank-to-boiler side will be warmer than if you did a couple of big heatings each day.

I now have smart meters so I can look at what our system does and there was a while after the meters were fitted that it kept the tank hot, before we switched to reheating it only at certain times unless it's nearly empty. The heat output consumed by hot water in three restricted-reheating weeks was 75.6kWh, 84.6kWh and 70kWh while keeping it hot needed 87kWh, 84.2kWh, 85kWh. That's enough of a difference for me not to switch back.

It's possible that usage patterns varied wildly or other confounding factors (but I did exclude a week where we were away 3 days), so I'd welcome any other reports.

 

[gbb]

The big question mark there, of course, the weather. Was it warming or cooling between the two months?

I'd expect keeping it hot even when not needed to use more energy because a hotter tank cools more (it's proportional to the difference in temperature to the outside) and there will also be more heat lost in the trip around the pipes because the tank-to-boiler side will be warmer than if you did a couple of big heatings each day.

I now have smart meters so I can look at what our system does and there was a while after the meters were fitted that it kept the tank hot, before we switched to reheating it only at certain times unless it's nearly empty. The heat output consumed by hot water in three restricted-reheating weeks was 75.6kWh, 84.6kWh and 70kWh while keeping it hot needed 87kWh, 84.2kWh, 85kWh. That's enough of a difference for me not to switch back.

It's possible that usage patterns varied wildly or other confounding factors (but I did exclude a week where we were away 3 days), so I'd welcome any other reports.

Its pertinant but i can't remember specifics. Two months, there would have been outdoor temperature differences that may well have influenced gas useage a bit but, while i can't remember the details, it wasnt a ...meh, maybe its a saving, it was a definate difference.
TBF, our habits are pretty...habitual , we always did, and always will bathe every night, washing etc is pretty much what it is week in week out, we never did use the heating a lot so i don't think there would have been any major useage differences at the time .

It'd be interesting to do the same again. I might end up with a different outcome, who knows.

 

[MrGrumpy]

I can't definitevely say i'm right but here's what i found many years ago (following a discussion at work, comparing hot water left on all the time vs timed periods)
At that time, we always switched ours on early afternoon, nice hot water for the evening baths.
Colleague said this is wrong, you should leave it on all the time, that way you're only trickling in heat to keep a tank hot.

So i spent a month, reading the gas meter daily under our normal regime.
Then spent a month with the hot water left on permanently, reading the meter daily.

We used less gas with the latter. I have left our on ever since.

My heating is set to be in all the time , temp is set or for during the day and another temp set for night time. Hot water is times morning and night. I guess for the hot water , heat loss should not be huge with modern not water tanks ? Mine is tepid to touch . So I’m guessing minimal heat loss .

 

[icowden]

Colleague said this is wrong, you should leave it on all the time, that way you're only trickling in heat to keep a tank hot.

The problem is that there are a *lot* of variables. For example if you have something like a MegaFlo then yes, always on is more efficient. If you have a standard hot water tank that leaches heat, then I suspect that heating when needed is probably going to take less energy. In my case I measured and my energy use dropped by about a third after I had adjusted the thermostat and hot water.

 

[mjr]

Its pertinant but i can't remember specifics. Two months, there would have been outdoor temperature differences that may well have influenced gas useage a bit but, [...] i don't think there would have been any major useage differences at the time .

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the usage would be different because you acted differently because of the weather, but rather that the tank would lose more heat if it was generally colder.

@MrGrumpy is correct that a modern very-insulated tank wouldn't suffer from this too much, but I thought we were talking about many years ago, so it probably would.

 

[presta]

I can't definitevely say i'm right but here's what i found many years ago (following a discussion at work, comparing hot water left on all the time vs timed periods)
At that time, we always switched ours on early afternoon, nice hot water for the evening baths.
Colleague said this is wrong, you should leave it on all the time, that way you're only trickling in heat to keep a tank hot.

So i spent a month, reading the gas meter daily under our normal regime.
Then spent a month with the hot water left on permanently, reading the meter daily.

We used less gas with the latter. I have left our on ever since.

You can't expect very meaningful answers measuring this way because your measurement will be confounded by weather changes too much. When I compared my heating, I ran the system for one week timed then one week continuous on alternate weeks for two months, and recorded daily temperatures, then compared the average kWh/K for the timed weeks against the continuous weeks.

Using the system on the timer can't cost more than continuous, but the costs don't run in proportion to the duty cycle of the timer either. My system is timed to switch off for 7 hours each night, which is a 29% reduction, but the saving on gas is only about 7.9%. The reason for this is that when the system comes on, it warms up faster than it cools down when switched off, and the house continues to lose heat you've paid for all the time it remains warmer than it's surroundings, just like a storage heater. Heat loss doesn't stop and start at the same instants that the timer switches.

This shows what I mean, the blue trace is outside temperature, the green trace is inside, both from data logging thermometers, and the red trace is calculated data from a computer model of my heating system, which matches the measurements quite well. See how the temperature rises faster than it falls:

(The scaling of the plot is 1V/deg vertical, and 1s/hr horizontal)

Here's another plot, this time of modelled data. As before, red is inside air temperature, but I've made the outside temperature (blue) a constant 5 degrees, just for clarity. Green shows the inside surface of the inner leaf of the cavity wall, turquoise the outside surface of the inner leaf, violet the inside surface of the outer leaf, and grey the outside surface of the outer leaf. You can see how the thermal inertia of all the masonry smooths out the temperature variations, so that by the time you're at the surface in contact with the outside air, there's almost no daily variation in temperature at all.

This shows the outside surface of the wall (grey), and glass of a single glazed window (green) compared between timed and continuous, you can see how little difference there is on the wall, but comparatively more on the window, because they have less thermal inertia.

Finally, this shows how the heating consumption varies as you change the daily heating hours from 0 to 24. You can see that the savings are not in proportion to the cut in hours. At 17 hours on-time (29% less than 24 hours), the model is calculating a saving of 8.4% on the power consumed, which tallies fairly well with the data I measured at 7.9%.

 

[gbb]

Well, the reality hits.
Last months combined bill was £110
This months, just in, £208.

Thats heck of leap. Wasnt a particually cold winter, didnt / dont use the heating much although we do use the hot water heavily. I will have a look later at the actual readings and see if theres much difference in actual useage.

For us, its a leap but we can carry it. How on earth people close to the breadline are going to manage...?

 

[MontyVeda]

in other news, BP are reporting huge profits