Surely heating can't cost this much?

[Dreamwhisper]

My DM lives in a 3 bed detached bungalow. She's getting down because she's says her gas usage is coming to £600 per month, just gas?

I don't understand how this can be right. That's over £7,000 a month just for gas, and she is being very conservative with it. She has an old fashioned boiler (is it old fashioned? I don't know much but what I mean is, it's not a combi boiler it's the one that heats a tank of water for hot water). But it is a new boiler.

She won't get someone out to look at her meter in case it's wrong as she says they charge £50 if they come out and nothing's wrong. I want to pay this for her or go halves with my brother as I simply don't see how it can be right?

My bill has gone up a lot too but £600 a month for conservative heating seems an absolute unsustainable nightmare.

Ignore my wrong calculations!
The gas price cap is 10.7p not 33p.

127 units = 1418kwh x 10.33p = £146.50 /23 days = £6.37 a day.

Definitely get the boiler serviced, if it has a magnetic filter, get it cleaned out, the amount of muck in there is incredible, it’s like sticky, sooty sludge. If no filter, you can have a chemical flush, basically stick cleaning additive in, leave for a few days, drain the system then refill and add inhibitor.
DH is, as of this week, a fully qualified Gas safe engineer.
A boiler service is normally £60-90, depending on area.
He’s just gone self employed and is fully booked next week already just from facebook for services and fitting Hive controllers etc. People are desperate to save money.

OP says its a new boiler so shouldn't need anything doing to it. Need to look at the way it's being used e.g. how many hours is it on and at what temperature?, how long is the hot water on for and can the time be reduced?

Agree with others this couldn't possibly be correct, readings and forward estimations etc are out of kilter. Way forward is a smart meter so you can monitor down to the current/hourly cost and she or you to sign up for the providers online access to the account so you see accurately the monthly DD, current spend etc. No need for her/you to be in the dark. Also might be worth getting a plumber out to check all ok, don't understand the logic of £600 pcm ok but £50 not ok?! Best wishes getting it sorted.

Yeah 127 units in less than a month is extremely high. I’d check the meter readings and I’d have a gas engineer go through and check everything.

The new boiler might have been installed incorrectly. I think the DM needs a gas engineer to take a long look at the gas supply and settings.

There is probably just a mix up in the units that she reads from the meter and the units she is billed in.

Someone else had this on another thread.

If her meter is in m3 and she is billed in ft3 (x100) then she will pay 3x the amount she actually should do in gas (about).

127 units in m3 will cost about £150.
127 units in ft3 (x100) will cost about £450.

Get her to take a photo of her meter and a photo of her bill and send them to you.

The meter will have the units written on it as will the bill so you can check.

127 units in m3 is not an outrageous amount to use in 1 month (1400 kWh per month or 45 kWh per day), although it is a bit on the high side. Still, a big old boiler would probably run through that in a few hours per day.

The chances of a new boiler not being installed properly are close to zero. Modern boilers are on manufacturers default settings for one thing and with modern tech like digital flue gas analysers, which cost £1k+ and have to be recalibrated every year, mistakes are highly unlikely.

Gas engineers also have re-register with Gas safe every year, can be inspected on spec. AND they have to requalify for their licence every 5 years - it’s pretty much the most heavily regulated of ‘trades’.

Settings for heat and hot water could well be too high but for that amount of use, the only thing that makes sense is for the HW to be on constant.

Yet again for the hard of thinking - 127 metric units is not outrageous. I am currently using 3 units a day = £3.50, so 90 units/ £105 a month, in summer it’s below 1 unit/day.

I don't think the difference in imperial and metric meters works like that, with a 3x charge. There is another step in the equation of units to kWh when the meter is in imperial units.

I maintain that the supplier is basing the calcuation for the future direct debit on over-estimated use, for some reason, be it a meter misreading or a catchup bill from before, or something else.

Any resolution yet @Dreamwhisper ?

Decades ago we had a gas bill that was ludicrously high. Turned out the bush in front of the meter cupboard outside had basically obscured the meter reader's view so he'd misread a 1 as a 4. Instead of going up maybe a few hundred or whatever units for the quarter it had gone up by over 30,000!! Obviously we didn't pay, they were happy for us to send a photo of the actual reading. And we removed the bush!

Any chance your mum's meter could have been misread?

This might sound crazy, but she is definitely reading the gas meter rather than the electricity meter isn't she? I came across someone at work who didn't know there was 2 meters, as the electricity meter had 2 numbers on, they thought one was the gas. Credit due to customer of several thousand pounds.

My mum had this - was on a fixed cheap tarif back when they existed.

The energy company went under & she was sent emails but no letters to say EDF were taking them over & crucially to give a meter reading.

As my DB had done the original fixed deal online he’d unknowingly agreed to her being contacted by email - (she however doesn’t use it) so she missed any correspondence for further requests for readings etc.

Unbeknown to her they’d put her on what they call a default tarif -this is the most expensive kind & what they do when they can’t make contact with the account holder.

Then as energy prices increased & she never got onto a cheaper tarif she was hit with similar amounts to what your mum has to pay back.

The monthly amount she owed didn’t reflect her usage but basically debt.

If your mum can agree you to be a named contact on her account & then find out if she’s been put on a default tarif & if so get her onto the cheapest one (I wouldn’t fix atm).

Submit meter readings & work out why the amounts are so high.

Unfortunately my mum has had to pay her debt back as we looked back & they had sent her emails clearly saying she’d been put on default tarif etc.

But that tarif is like double or triple what she should have been paying.

An immersion is electric. Basically an enormous kettle element. And yep they cost a fortune to run. Gas boiler heating the hot water is cheaper

Haven't seen it mentioned but there was a big thing about you must submit a meter reading right before the rates went sky high a couple months ago, otherwise they have to guess how much usage is charged at the newer higher rate (or just charge it all at higher rate). Doesn't help now, but point is regular meter readings submitted will avoid things like that

Just because there is a hot water cylinder doesn't mean its an immersion heater. I have a similar system to the OPs mother and it uses gas to heat the water. I heat my water for 1 hour per day and that's sufficient for our needs as our shower is electric and appliances are cold fill.

Yep I have a tank but it’s heated by the gas boiler, it’s not an immersion heater.

I also have mine on for an hour a day and that does 3 of us showers and some left for hand washing etc.

It doesn't cost that much more to have water on all the time. We used to do this (with a new efficient boiler and well insulated tent) and it was marginally more expensive than having it on a few hours per day.

But I don't need it on all the time as 1 hour per day is sufficient. I dont want to pay more for no reason

Just to quote myself, and having looked at the Boiler Manual (for another reason), I believe that the built in upper temperatures allowed are:
Water - 64 deg C
Heating - 80 deg C.

Older immersion heaters and tank set ups seemed to bypass this, and I once had water coming out of the taps at near boiling I swear!

Thanks again for the replies, I'm still looking into this. Mum showed me her meter readings that she'd taken herself and explained why she thinks it's right from last bill in summer, because her rate was 6.9p and has now gone up to the 10.3p.

However, her estimated annual usage was 73,000kw!! (Not exactly I can't remember the figure off the top of my head)

My mum keeps saying she's not bothered about that now she's giving readings. But the point is, she thinks it's right (the £460 per month) and thinks it's right based on her minimal usage. Which means she's paying through the nose for minimal usage. And since the next bill doesn't come in til February, she'll be in that state over the whole winter.

They were charging her £200 a month over the summer. She didn't have the heating on at all

Op can you download the app for whatever company your mum is with and submit her meter readings for her? My initial bill was a ridiculous amount (off of the company’s own estimate) as soon as I downloaded the app and submitted actual meter readings I went from over £1000 owed to them to £250 in credit. This allowed me to adjust my own direct debit on the app to less than half what they’d originally asked for. This also allows you to bypass being on the phone for hours too, if they’re not being very helpful. Good luck.

I would get the hot water tank checked. I don't have a combi boiler and I'd managed to knock the sensor that tells the tank when it has reached temperature. Without that it was constantly heating the water and we used £80 in a few weeks in the summer when I'd expected that to last me a few months! Once fixed it went back to me paying more in standing charges than I was actually using. I'm EDF. Don't forget to add the standing charge too, you pay that even if you use nothing.

Can you report actual readings each month?

The only customer using 73000kWh of electricity per year would be someone with a "farm" in their loft (if you know what I mean....).
I really do wish the companies (sytsem) would flag up this kind of abnormality, rather than hope (or not) that it gets spotted by the customer. While they keep the moneu and then grumble baut giving it back.
The key word is ESTIMATED - i.e. predicted.... Funny how they never predict it will be lower/cost less.
The unit price will mean that the increase in charge will be about 70%, not "even" double.
The standing charge will be about £270 per year, for both. That is not the increase, but the new price.