To ask how I’m supposed to pay this heating bill?

[ye10000]

This month I put the heating on set to 18. It automatically clicks off when it’s got to 18 and it goes off entirely at 10pm until the morning. I’ve looked at usage and it says the heating has been on an average of 7 hours a day. This had meant a bill of 502 pounds. We are in a three bed detached. That is almost a quarter of my income and I have one dc in nursery, single parent. I am so worried about the coming months, is 7 hours a day average a lot? I thought I was being careful.

Clematis. It’s higher for sheltered housing. These are apparently the regs for general needs new builds. I was surprised at 19 for bedrooms too. But they know their stuff and have to design buildings with insulation/heating, that can meet these standards.

This is where I get confused, according to my home display for my smart meter, two hours heating, two hours hot water a bit of cooking on a gas stove, basic electricity came to approx £8 which works out at £56 a week or £ 224 a month.

My concern is when the temperature goes above 20 or below 10 - then I feel uncomfortable either side of those temps. I never heat my bedroom - electric blanket before I get in and 2 duvets at the moment.

I could not afford to heat anything day long at 21 degrees - laugh if you like but I was born in winter 1947 and my childhood was spent in a farmhouse without central heating and nobody died from the cold.

I find offices and shops overheated.

My bill for the month on a detached house in the midlands is £150 for gas and electricity. I am also in credit. It is up to you if you want to have the heating on all day at 21 degrees but I have other things I would rather spend my money on.

That’s a ridiculous amount.
What is your actual useage in kwh?
This is mine for the last week, my heating is set to 18-19° from 06.00 to 10pm when we’re at home.

My gas bill for the last month was £120 and we have a 4/5 bed 1980s house heated to 20 degrees all day. We're in the south and have double glazing and loft insulation but it still seems very high even if you are further north and don't have good insulation.

What is the breakdown between gas and electric?

Worth being sure you are trying to cut down the most expensive part of your bill.

It’s horrendous. I haven’t put my heating on at all though and when we breathe, we can see our breath. I just can’t afford it. Going through a divorce with two children and I have chosen to eat over heat out house. I have a full time job too but struggling to pay for anything.

Is not using the heating the new competitive undereating on Mumsnet? 🤣

Some of the post on here are insane. I wear a jumper and have the heating set to 18 most days, or 20 during a very cold snap/when we have guests. I don't wear fingerless gloves or a blanket in the office... so I don't do the same at home. Fair enough if you're struggling and needs must but it sounds like a lot of people here are doing it (or pretending to) out of some weird sense of pride. I didn't grow up with central heating so I prefer 18 degrees but my friends and in-laws have said it feels chilly (hence bumping it up to 20 for guests). How can 18 be too much when everyone I know thinks it's too little?

I think a lot of people need to realise that not all houses in the U.K. are the same!! A lot of the housing stock is pretty old and not particularly well built to withstand cold temperatures. Many houses are also very difficult to insulate.

so there can be great variation between people’s heating costs.

You didn't read it then did you. My log burner is a once a week thing ( Sunday afternoon, usually, when we're sitting in front of it) so 6 days out of 7 no heating.
Not stupid.

And?

PEOPLE CAN'T AFFORD IT.

Do you think everyone just gets to live healthily?

Do poor people die more often of winter related issues? YES

For the millions that this is reality for it is just reality, theres no 'well a study said that I should'. Its not an active choice, its something we have to live with and do (no one is dropping down dead of heart attacks as soon as it goes under 16 btw).

If OP cannot afford it, then she cannot afford it others saying they live that way and its not so bad if you do x, y and z are not the problem. People burying their heads in the sand and acting like the 'poor' are just to 'stupid' to understand how to put the heating on is the issue.

Saying 'studies show that...' is the same crap as saying 'its healthier to eat home cooked organic foods not mcdonalds'... it ignores that millions don't have the time, money or equipment to do those things so its not an option.

It is simply ignorant wealth privilege.

Seven hours is a lot for us. I had it on for seven hours yesterday and saturday but we had heavy snow and it was absolutely freezing. Generally during the winter we would have it on for one hour in the morning and three hours in the evening.

It's fine to have it on lots if you can afford it. If not though you need to adapt your behaviour accordingly and use things like heated throws.

I'd rather be warm and cut back on other things if I had to. And being warm for me is around 21.5. But some houses harder to heat than others. My house is much better since new central heating put in with bigger radiators.

Is that £500 just for gas or £500 combined gas and electricity? As you are in a semi,I would turn off the heating upstairs and the radiators in your hall stairs and landing. Just heat the living rooms. Upstairs you can use hot water bottles, Electric blankets or even a 10 min blast from an electric fan heater before bed. Are you double glazed? If not covering your windows with cling film or bubble wrap really helps. Keeping curtains closed in the day helps too.

It’s not going to be continually on, as it should be clicking on and off over the 7hours. Unless your house has really poor insulation and it just looses the heat quick?

What was your consumption in kWh for elec and kWh for gas?

What heating system do you run? Gas combi boiler? Or do you have a hot water cylinder?
What radiators do you have - do they have control valves on them so you can turn off in certain rooms?

It seems high demand even if you have it on all day - what is your house like - age, windows, loft insulation? Are you renting or owning?

@housethatbuiltme i don’t think you understood at all the point I was making. Of course there is inequality. And the U.K. has really shitty housing for the most part. But it’s not very helpful to the OP for people to post the usual “my house is 14 and to me that’s really warm - I wear a T-shirt” or “it only costs me £20 per week to hear my house 24 hours a day - you are doing something wrong”. We do need to acknowledge that heating is not a luxury, as some people love to suggest.

it would be more helpful to make practical suggestions such as heating only certain rooms, getting boiler serviced, etc.

Ours is on at 18 from 6.30–9am and then 6–9pm, which might be similar to what the OP means by 7 hours, not necessarily 'all day'.

I work from home too. If I crank my office radiator up in the morning it stays fairly warm in there most of the day, although it gets chilly around 4–5pm. I'm a chilly mortal, so I have warm slippers, thermals and an Oodie knock-off, and I wrap a warm blanket round myself if I'm still cold or want to feel cosier.

7hrs at 18° isn't excessive. You don't want a damp house. £502 is way too much for that.

Mine is on 24hrs a day and doesn't cost that much.

It could be a number of things.
Undersized rads, room thermostat in the wrong place. Wrong flow temperature at the boiler. Insufficient insulation.
My hall has always been cold, it has single skin brick (covered with foil backed board) next to the front door. If my room stat had been there, the boiler would have been constantly firing and my living room would have been like an oven.
DH has just changed the ancient 70’s radiator for a double finned, much taller one and it’s like night and day, you can actually feel the heat coming up the stairs now.

Our bill is around £290 a month. We WFH so have the heating on all the time at around 18 degrees. We're in a 3 bed, adjust the radiators so that rooms we don't use are lower temp than those we do. We have very high ceilings upstairs so if we didn't have the heating on all the time, it would be hard to heat them once the temperature dropped. We turned the heating down low when we went away at the weekend and it took ages to get the rooms feeling warm again.

Firstly look into how you are billed. If you aren't paying by direct debit you will be paying a premium for doing so.

You are paying by direct debit there are 2 options spread a typical years use over 12 payments or changing direct debit that pays the use for that month.
The majority of direct debit customers are on averaged bills which means the very high bills of Dec- Feb are spread out through the year.

Then look at making efficient use of your energy. We have our heating on all year round but we can set the temperature to vary at 4 points of the day. Depending on who is in ours is set at 13deg overnight and between 16-17.5 during the day. If the toddler is in it's 17.5. if just adults in 17. If working from home I get comfortable 17 then drop it down to 16.5 just before lunch and if that is ok I drop it down to 16. It goes back up as I leave to pick up toddler. If we are leaving the house the heating gets dropped to 15 about half an hour before. I should maintain close to the previous temperature during that time.

We are with octopus and do the period 90min challenges on how little energy you can use and we get quite a drop by shutting everything off. If you have a smart meter go around each room and see what the effect of things left plugged in or on standby using the current usage setting.

That seems a high use to me. The last weekend was very cold here and we had the heating on all day and I think it clicked on overnight too. We spent about £8-9 a day for the 2 days gas and electric which would be £240-270. These are by far our biggest spend days of 2023, last year we had maybe 10 of these days over the winter months.

It's not possible to say the bill is too high. The OP might have a badly insulated house in which case it would take a lot more fuel to heat it to 18 degrees for seven hours.

It’s not healthy for the house not to heat.
It’s been -6 overnight here and 0 during day. Too right I have my heating on! It’s been bloody freezing.

I think paying this way is is best. I couldn't cope with getting a huge bill in the winter and small ones in the summer.

It's so much easier to budget when you pay the same every month. Even if it's underpaid, most companies will let you carry the deficit over to the next year as long as you pay enough each month to clear it by the end of that year.

If you ring them and explain, OP, they may be willing to set up a payment plan, especially if you can offer a reasonable amount towards this bill, eg £200 now and £300 to be cleared by monthly payments over the next 6-12 months.