Incredibly high electricity usage whilst we’ve been away. WTF?!

[FfeminyddCymraeg]

We have just returned from a long weekend away (left Thursday evening) and I checked my Smart meter when we got home and it’s showing that we used £12 of electricity yesterday and £9 already today (at 2pm).

We rarely use these amounts when here so have no idea why it is so high. The boiler was set to ‘away mode’ so only kicks in when the internal temp drops quite low - the app for this shows it hasn’t kicked in so it wasn’t the boiler.

I have no idea why it’s done this but it has to be wrong. We made a point of turning everything g off but even if a light was left on, it shouldn’t be anywhere near this high. As I said, it’s more than we use over a normal weekend when the oven will be in use, a few TVs. You can see that from the bar for Sunday last week.

How do I go about getting this sorted?! It has to be wrong!

I’d start by taking your actual meter readings and making sure what’s on your display is correct. The screen you have there isn’t the actual meter so can be wrong.

In KWh

I can’t see any numbers on the actual box outside - it’s just a digital display with the unit rate shown 🤷🏼‍♀️

This happened to us as part of our water tank had fallen off the wall knocking the immersion on.

That much power is probably either heating something or could someone have charged a car? Do you have an outside socket?

Check the immersion heater. Failing that, a malfunctioning fridge freezer? Have you cleaned the cooling bars on the back recently or are they covered in dust and grease? Is it labouring?

Or do you have one of those 500w motion-detecting outside lights?

Another vote for the 500 watt security bulb.

My vote is for immersion heater, we only discovered that ourselves recently. U think u turned off the boiler but the bloody immersion kicked in and kept running.

Does it have any buttons? I had to Google how to read my sort of smart meter as it wasn't obvious at all. Mine has two buttons and I have to press them in a certain order and a certain number of times to get the reading. It's a bloody faff!

Has the batteries on a thermostat packed in ?

When they go on our heating thermostat, it clicks on and doesn’t turn off. Mind you, the house would have been like a tropical jungle when you got back. But something like that ?

Someone I know received a big electric bill for an empty house he was selling. It came to light that the estate agent handling the sale had been parking their electric car there every day and charging it up.

so did the estate agent have to foot the bill?

We had our security lights changed last week and they didn’t bring enough and so for three days they temporarily put up two old style non led security lights and to add insult to injury they wired them up incorrectly so they wouldn’t turn off. My usual £7 electricity bill (high enough!) went up to £13 a day!

check security lights

Omg. The cheeky fucker. Hope they had to pay the bill.

Yes I believe they did. The chap asked the estate agent if anybody had been using the house as they had the keys. The agent ‘fessed up. Apparently he got his arse handed to him by both my friend and his boss. 😄

I vote for Immersion heater. Normally it's not doing much with the boiler on as the water is heated by the boiler.

Did anyone have keys to get into your house while you were away? Family? Friends? Neighbour?

Do you have an outside socket?

Thanks for all your suggestions - I’ve been driving everybody mad trying to work it out.

We have an outside socket but my neighbour hasn’t seen anybody parked up (DH has a works van so not like they could assume the house was empty).

We don’t have an immersion boiler - just a standard Viesmann combo boiler installed 3 years ago. No security lights either.

The only thing we can think of is the UFH in the extension. We usually leave it on low (16c) during the winter months to take the chill off the ceramic tiles and it has been on since the beginning of November. However, it usually makes very little difference to our usually electricity bill (it’s not moved significantly since we’ve come home and turned it off/on) which our previous readings show, but I’m wondering whether it’s been working harder with the main boiler off and the ambient temperature being lower as a result 🤷🏼‍♀️

If it is that then I want to cry 😭 seems extortionate!

Also, house was bloody freezing when we got back and so I don’t think it was a dodgy thermostat! Thermostat was reading a chilly 12c when I remotely turned on the heating (which has taken hours to correct!)

UFH sounds like the likely suspect as it may have been on for longer than usual especially if the rest of the house was cold.

UFH for sure.

I think it was the ufh. It's been quite cold this weekend