Anyone else cry over their bills?

[insanegasbill]

Got our monthly energy bill this morning.

£525. For one month.

I honestly cried. I can't remember the last time I cried over a bill. How is this even possible?!

Last month it was £390 ish which was bad enough so we budgeted around £400 for this month and our usage seemed to be very similar.

We are both employed with good jobs and we are sinking with these ridiculous outgoings.

In January our rent will be £900 as it's going up.

So we are looking at £1400 ish just for rent, gas and electricity come January.

Heating is on a timer and we really do try to limit it, we've been using electric plug in heaters as much as possible instead.

AIBU that this just isn't sustainable? I just needed somewhere to get that out and scream into the void...... What's the actual point of working as hard as we do to be struggling like this? 😢

Assuming it's correct for the past month, based on actual readings, this is the downside of paying month to month rather than equal monthly direct debits where you spread the annual cost over the whole year. Your bills in winter will be very high and at least double what they were last year unless you're on an old fix.

Whether or not it's right depends on your usage obviously, but if you're in a larger or hard to heat house, plus use the tumble dryer and cook a lot, it could well be.

We pay by equal monthly DD and our supplier estimates that our Dec, Jan and Feb bills will be about £300 pm, whereas in summer they'll be less than half that due to no heating or tumble dryer use and less lighting and probably less cooking of roasts and stews etc.

Yes £80 a week on prepayment gas and it's not even warming the house up, makes me feel sick. I have someone coming to look at the boiler this week because I'm sure there's something wrong somewhere.

You could pay what you can afford and tell the company your struggling, offer to pay the debt off in the spring/summer months when the gas isn't needed as much.
So many people are in your shoes right now long as you offer some payment they won't put you on a prepayment meter. They have to help their customers.

Are you getting the £66 too?

Because I assumed it would be cheaper. Obviously I've assumed incorrectly based on the responses on here.

We both work and are out of the house most days. We have one day off each per week when we are at home. Even on those days we don't blast the heating constantly, just a couple of intervals throughout the day.

Yes but we have a few high outgoings.

We are in a large old style house with high ceilings so probably not efficient to heat.

Oh yes - of course. so take the £66 off that, leaves us with a bill of £459. Actually makes it slightly better. Still ridiculous but less so.

Have you looked at your online usage and bill?

If you have a smart meter you should be able to see a breakdown of how much gas and electricity you used when, in half hour slots. So you can see what times are expensive and how they coincide with cooking/heating/showering/tumble drying etc.

If you don't want big bills in winter, ask your supplier to go onto a standard direct debit arrangement. You'll pay the same amount all year round, so will be able to spread the cost of the high winter bills.

My god don't use electric heaters! You may as well put a hairdryer on blast!

If your heating the home a couple of times a day it might be why, your boiler has to keep firing up from cold and the colder it is the more expensive it is to heat the boiler.

Have you tried running it at a constant low temp? Also you can turn down how hot your water and radiators gets on the boiler mines set for 55 on water and 50 for boilers.
what about around the house do you have thermal curtains and the likes?

A lot of you need to learn to read the power rating on the back of things (ie 500w), learn what that means and how much it will cost to run per hour for the price per KwH you pay.

Another thing - Martin Lewis tries to keep people stupid with generally waffy talk about "average bill capped at £2,500". You are better off looking up what the actual KwH prices are, look up your usage over past year then work out YOUR expected cost.

What’s even worse is the price cap ends in April. Then the bills are going to be astronomical. I have no idea what people are going to do.

this is a good tip, thank you. I assumed running it constantly at a lower temp would cost more than two quick blasts morning and evening, but it seems not.

I'm praying and hoping it will be warmer weather by then.

History tells us that the weather tends to be warmer in April.

If the weather is indeed warmer in April, you can tell us that your prayers were what caused it!

Mine is much cheaper having a blast (1 hour) in the morning and a longer period (4 hours) in the evening than having it constantly for a lower temp. If you do this then keep an eye on the meter.

No, dont listen to this. Only use your heating when needed, especially with victorian leaky houses.

I’m sure it will be but what the hell does winter 2023 look like?!

Moving forward there are a lot os sites can help you with budgeting your utilities. In my tariff gas is much cheaper than electric so using electric heaters would make no sense here. We are two people working from home and heating is on 20 for 18 hours. We reduced our bill by 65:00 last month by following these.

Look on your current bill for your

Standing charge per day
Charge per kilowat
Is there an exit fee if you leave

You can use comparison sites or money saving expert to find a cheaper energy provider & move

It will definitely be the electric heaters. I think there's been some media coverage about certain electric heaters been cheap to run but it's not the case for all of them. Use your central heating and put the electric heaters away and see what the bill is next month, hopefully it will be lower!

Our bill was similar. We have an electric car so we expected it to be more than average but not over £500.

We went through the last year of readings on our smart meter and worked out that they were charging us for twice as much as we actually use. We called British Gas and persuaded them to reduce it to £350 but they wouldn't go any lower. One thing we noticed in our account is that the reading they took in February when we moved to British Gas was about 4 times higher than what our smart meter says. They insist it's correct so we're going through the complaints procedure for that one.

Heating with electricity is loads more expensive than having the heating on, unelss you are only heating one (small and enclosed space), so knock the electric heaters on the head.

It does seem a lot if you are out most of the day, unless you have a huge house. I would look at your insolation and general energy consumption.

This is the problem with paying the bill when it comes rather than spreading the cost. We pay £366 per month all year. We built up a lot of credit over the warmer months. Our bills would be around £600 per month in the colder months otherwise. Plug in electric heaters will use a lot. A 2kw fan heater will cost 68p per hour run.