To think they are lying? ... electricity prices won't be going up by 50% in April ...

[Shouldbeworkingnotreadingtalk]

Keep reading that electricity prices are going to sky rocket by "upto 50%"... so I worked mine out whilst doing some house admin . . I'm shocked at the actual figures ...

We currently pay 21p per KWh of energy used. (Viable rate.) . Predictions once the price cap ends are for unit prices in April is anywhere between 40-48p per unit. . (From googling / Martin Lewis ), I could be reading this wrong ...

Or

I can fix a rate today with my current supply eon for 38p.

Is this maths right? (Well, I know it is!)

Say hypothetically we use a slightly higher than average 9,000 unit a year:

21p x 9000 = £1,890 (£157pm)
48p x 9000= £4,320 (£360pm)

Doesn't include standing charge or vat on those prices either!

That feels like a crazy hike, more like 120% increase (?) - so why aren't we being warned a bit more .... We are a ridiculously heavy user, (big house, tumble drier happy, old inefficient freezers in garage etc, no gas so everything electric,,) so this week I've condensed some freezer space, losing a big old girl that leaked ice, and ordered x2 airers for the washing.....
I'm still looking at many other ways to lower my kilowatt useage - (I've warned the fish their pond pump may have to go on timer ... ).

But my AIBU is that I'm miffed at 50%, surely it's much, much more and we are in for a huge shock?
VERY HAPPY (relieved) to be told I've got it wrong and IABU.

@nordica

I'm really worried about it as I live alone so everything needs to be covered by one income. And there is never any help for people like me because I don't qualify for benefits and am not a pensioner obviously so no warm homes grants.

Have already made changes to how I cook - using the oven will be a luxury now. Heating is already off most of the day and turned up to 18C for a few hours in the evening.

@nordica - I'm also really worried about this. I'm looking at maybe getting a lodger in to help with bills but I don't really want to have to do this.

As someone else said, in April/May we generally tend to use less heating so there will be savings there.

I'm actually looking into solar panels and help with getting them or just investing in them.

Wondering if this is a cunning plan by the government to get everyone back into the office and therefore using their office heating/electricity/gas and spending loads in Pret etc? Train prices have apparently shot up though and where I work (King's Cross) there's a lot of footfall daily re commuting/students etc.

Sadly my calculations came out similar OP. It is a real shock, and I don't know why, even though it is in the news, the full stark reality of what it will mean to households isn't being publicised enough. Only Martin Money Saver is speaking out robustly. We need more of an outcry about this - I'm not sure we will be able to afford it, along with NI hike, council tax hike, interest rate hike, inflation hike etc etc, and I really worry because I know that there are many households with even less capacity to absorb these things than us

@ayyeeeright

A sizeable proportion of our electricity comes from gas-fired power stations.

Maybe I'm being thick but I was totally under the impression we were 100% renewable electricity.

Or is that just Scotland and not the whole UK?

Or have I completely misunderstood this

Not thick, just misunderstood - and honestly sometimes the messaging about this in the press is deliberately misleading.

We have some hours on some days where the grid is run entirely on renewables.

This happens more often in Scotland due to better access to renewable power (wind, hydro etc)

But as a whole, we’re still heavily reliant on gas to generate electricity. At the moment (10.00am today) North Scotland is pulling 80% power from wind and 20% from hydro, Southern England is pulling 83% from gas and the rest of the mix is largely renewable.

@OnlyFoolsnMothers

A reminder to ensure you claim your £6 a week wfh allowance from the government, either by changing your tax code or doing a self cert. £312 quid a year- not a huge help but something to put towards the surge of prices

@OnlyFoolsnMothers to be clear you don't save £6 a week, you save the tax on £6 a week. That's around £60 saving fhe year if you pay 20% tax.

A very token gesture towards the extra costs of wfh

Totally with you on the food issue - we will see similar price shocks in food sooner or later

Rewild where it helps protect farmland from flooding or soil erosion and insect populations but don't take valuable land out of good use

Especially since much of our food land could vanish under salt water

This scares me. Im a single parent struggling as it is im lucky i do work but its not a big income. Ive started trying to limit my heating to max 2 hours a day im even worrying this is too much. It doesnt help my son has always had problems with his chest and now im trying to limit heating his chest has kicked off again. Absolutely devastated things have turned out this way for everyone 😢

@mumda the point of rewilding is that you rewild your worst farmland, the bits that only provide food if you subsidise that production hugely. Better for the environment to intensify farming on the good bits of land, and give the worst bits back to nature. Same amount of food production, more wildlife. Not stupid at all. And weve been importing food for generations.

I've managed to fix to this but worried for when it ends. I'm annoyed at myself I didn't fix for 2 years

@MaybeHeIsMyCat

I've managed to fix to this but worried for when it ends. I'm annoyed at myself I didn't fix for 2 years

Wow that's a very good deal!

@ayyeeeright

Scotland is not entirely renewable but now very close. The large scale thermal plants have closed but there are some small scale thermal plants left. And some of the islands still run on oil plants.

However it's a single GB power market so it doesn't really matter what is being generated close to your home.

The price of power is set by the marginal generator - the most expensive plant needed to meet demand at that moment- which is usually a gas fired plant in winter.

And gas is very expensive at the moment across the globe. Nothing we can do to control that.

In spring, when demand is lower, the price of power can often be set by renewables so can be zero or even negative (eg if you were on an agile tariff you would be paid to consume power)

The best thing to do is to hurry up and build more renewables (including restarting building onshore wind in England) to reduce the amount of time we need to run gas plants for power generation - this would make us less dependent on the global gas market.

The UK also had the leakiest and worst insulated home in Europe. A study shows in five hours a UK home temperature declines by 3C while in Germany it is only 1C.

We have to get serious about insulating our homes to German/Scandi standards. People will spend money on sex ponds for their homes but not on insulation

Insulate Britain are correct even if their protests are annoying.

It's outrageous new builds are still permitted with crappy levels of energy efficiency.

twitter.com/tom_nuttall/status/1480447571244064768?t=Fi8EY-Ftm5x0dUyHCPOArA&s=19

As far as sorting your usage out, we bought a monitoring smart plug for about a tenner and plugged it into everything for a couple of days at a time to see if there was anything that was eating electricity.

My parents borrowed it and plugged their (quite old) freezer into it and found out it was costing about £25 a month to run. They bought a new one for £120 that costs about £1.75 to run instead.

A study shows in five hours a UK home temperature declines by 3C while in Germany it is only 1C.

I read that the insulated properties of the German home are undone by the habit of leaving windows open for fresh air. Although at these rates I suspect that might change quickly.

I was a segment on the use that Shell is going to making record profits in the billions? I don’t understand how it works?

It also said the last time they was making these kind of profits were right before the last recession.

@ProudAlly I fixed about an hour before they pulled the offer was like the speed of lightning trying to type my details in to switch!!

Even where power is defined as being 100% renewable, this is because suppliers purchase green certificates (ie proving that electricity has been generated from a renewable source) rather than because there’s anything different about the molecule of energy that’s coming through your plug socket.

Needless to say, with the huge focus on net zero, renewable certificates have also increased over the year (even more than gas costs !!). So promising to be ‘green’ does come at a huge cost too !!

@GingerFoxInAT0phat

I was a segment on the use that Shell is going to making record profits in the billions? I don’t understand how it works?

It also said the last time they was making these kind of profits were right before the last recession.

It’s because where big energy companies have hedged their volumes (bought gas/power in advance), those contracts become really valuable when prices go up. At any point in time, a company has to measure how valuable those contracts are and show them in their accounts - so will recognise huge profits. This is basically misleading (but will be disclosed) because they need those valuable contracts to meet and supply future customer demand - they can’t just cash them in.

When they actually supply customers (which are generally only accounted for as supply is made) all those profits will be ‘used up’. It’s a timing thing.

A lot of the energy companies might look like they have big profits this year, but should disclose why this is not really the case. Those profits will supply very expensive customer contracts in the future.

Going green -investing in renewable energy - is expensive, but it will be cheaper in the long run and would have smoothed out the pain we have now

Shouldbeworkingnotreadingtalk do you mean 14,000 units a month, or a year?

Have just checked and I currently use 2,237 units a YEAR. My usage doesn’t include heating but even so that is a dramatic difference to your experience.

It wasn’t always like that. Several years ago when ill health forced early retirement, I bought an energy monitor and went round checking what my money gobblers really were.

I almost immediately turned off my underfloor heating mats in the bathrooms, their use was astronomical. The tumble dryer is now saved for towels and very cold / damp days and most surprisingly of all (for me) I had to stop using my overhead lights with their 8 old fashioned bulbs each and turned on my lamps.

I also don't heat my upstairs rooms but use hot water bottles, turned down the thermostat on my water heating (it was on the default setting - much too high in the opinion of my plumber) and use a log burner / heated throw. However those measures are designed to reduce gas heating costs.

I do think that some of the increases we are seeing are policy designed to force behavioural changes in our energy usage and I do believe the days of cheap energy are well and truly over.

It is painful especially for the elderly and those unable to cope with these increases and I just hope that there is going to be sufficient support for those forced to choose to eat or heat.

I agree with the pp

Petrol and energy are not going to be cheaper any time soon. The govt want to force us to change our ways.

Energy could get cheaper actually.

www.statista.com/statistics/374970/united-kingdom-uk-gas-price-forecast/

The projected cost per therm is predicted to produce but obviously the domestic costs are a lot more complicated that the raw costs of gas and what companies and te government do is unpredictable. But this idea that it will only go up isn't necessarily true.

@KatnissNeverdone

We're going to be screwed. Our bill has already increased to £220 a month which is really stretching us. DS is disabled and all his equipment uses electricity. Electric wheelchair, profiling bed, track hoists, rise and fall bath, functions on his toilet. We also need to keep the house pretty warm all the time as he finds it really hard to stay warm.

We're a one wage family as it's more or less impossible for me to work due to his care needs around DH's shifts and yet DH's wage just about puts us over the threshold for warm home discounts.

Similar position here - so much relies on electricity cause of my disabilities, yet despite our usage going down by about a third, our bill has tripled. I literally cannot pay it - each month I just get further and further into debt.

Completely reliant on benefits, but warm home discount and the extra £100 this winter from the welsh gov barely touched it.

And I've been in the house no more than usual, what with not working.

If you have a fridge/freezer that is over 10 years old, buy a new energy efficient model. The fridge uses more electricity than any other appliance in your home and new models are much, much more efficient.

We can’t all just go out an upgrade our appliances! I’ve just had to replace my washing machine after it started smoking. I’m a LP, been out of work since October, I have no savings, I’m living on credit that is swiftly running out because UC isn’t covering my already slimmed down living costs. I sat and cried when the machine broke. New machine had to go on a credit card that has a 49% apr. (Because yes I have a bad credit score and can’t get anything better) I won’t be able to pay if off in full before interest is applied and I’ve now got less credit available for essentials. Laying out money now to counteract a bill hike later just isn’t an option.

We are cutting back on our spending wherever we can because of this. No more meals out or luxuries such as Hello Fresh or Gousto. Cutting back on the amount of meat we eat and holidays etc. Im dreading what things will be like when the fixed rate on my mortgage comes to an end. Depressing times ahead.

Haroweller, you're absolutely right about the OP using a phenomenal amount of electricity. You say you use 2237 pa and ovo energy says the average household uses 3,700 (see my previous post for the link) so the OP's calculations based on 9000 will really terrify people.

If you're going to run a hot tub you'll have to accept it's going to cost a grand a year. Electric underfloor heating is horrifically expensive to run and yet a lot of people leave it on in bathrooms and conservatories 24/7. Heating water electrically — immersion tank or electric shower — is expensive and so you may want to cut back on the long hot baths.

Electricity usage monitors will help you find out which appliances are costing most to run. This one shows you not just what you're using but how much it's costing:
www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00JIMQP6Y?linkCode=ogi&psc=1&th=1&tag=mumsnetforu03-21

In the 1960s we were all living in draughty single-glazed homes heated to 16C and we survived. In the 1980s the average household temperature had crept up to 18C. Now people are expecting to heat their homes to 21C+. I have ordinary youngish clients (not disabled, not elderly) who expect to live in t-shirts at 23C all year round. In 30+ years time, when we have better green energy solutions, electricity should be cheaper, but we're going through the transition phase and that's expensive.

@MaryAndGerryLivingInDerry

If you have a fridge/freezer that is over 10 years old, buy a new energy efficient model. The fridge uses more electricity than any other appliance in your home and new models are much, much more efficient.

We can’t all just go out an upgrade our appliances! I’ve just had to replace my washing machine after it started smoking. I’m a LP, been out of work since October, I have no savings, I’m living on credit that is swiftly running out because UC isn’t covering my already slimmed down living costs. I sat and cried when the machine broke. New machine had to go on a credit card that has a 49% apr. (Because yes I have a bad credit score and can’t get anything better) I won’t be able to pay if off in full before interest is applied and I’ve now got less credit available for essentials. Laying out money now to counteract a bill hike later just isn’t an option.

I also think that energy usage of appliances is often vastly overstated in terms of cost/benefit.

I am going to look at our fridge freezer again because it is well over 20 years old, but I checked a couple of years ago and I think the saving would have been about £40 a year, so it would have been around 10 years to break even to just buy a new one to reduce energy costs.

Even less worth it was our boiler. We had a flurry of flyers telling us that if our boiler was more than 10 years old we could save huge amounts by upgrading to a new one. Now, ours is just coming up to 17 years old, but when I looked into this, we might have saved £20-50 a year, and a new boiler costs around £1500-2000, so that's a payback time of at least 30 years!

Anyone thinking of replacing working appliances to save energy needs to look at this very closely and for anything that plugs in, the first step would be to either research their actual model (info probably available on the internet) or buy a cheap plug in energy monitor and measure the actual consumption of their appliance and compare with new models.