Can i ask your energy costs in an old house?

[Itsallabouttea]

Just trying to gauge how common our situation is!
We moved to a 3 bed Victorian end terrace last summer, typical house of the period, solid walls and EPC rating D. Prior to this I was a lodger with bills included so had little awareness of the cost. At the moment we're spending £8-9 a day just to be remotely comfortable - heating on for a couple of hours in the morning and maybe 3 in the evening. We both work from home and the house constantly feels absolutely Baltic - even when the heating's been on for hours it never gets above 16°. Is this just normal for houses of this age and are we destined to be bankrupt by the energy bill? We're paying 27p kWh for electricity, 7 for gas with Octopus

£300 in a Victorian 4 bed semi.
we wfh and have the heating on all day when it’s cold.
we also have a fire which heats most of the house on an evening when we light it.

We’re around a tenner a day minimum and it gets towards £20 in cold snaps. House is about 1700 sq ft.

The biggest difference we’ve found is keeping the house dry. Last winter was miserable but since a new roof and sorting some of the other spots where water was getting in, plus dehumidifier, this winter is a different animal entirely. Not a cheap animal, but 18/19 degrees feels cosy, I think because the house is drier.

You can buy a silver reflective, padded sheet to put behind your radiators it stops the heat being immediately sucked into the walls and pushes it into the rooms instead. Also I would def say either open a window or get a de humidifier

Four bed Victorian mid terrace. We’re at work during the day but have it on all evening and at weekends . Old single glazed sash windows and paying £170 for gas and electricity.

Small 1850s granite midterrace, about £100 a month on gas and same again on electricity. I think our gas bill is helped massively by the fact we got a new very efficient boiler 3 years ago when we moved in. We keep heating at 20. Biggest help is keeping the kitchen door closed as the kitchen is a poorly built 70s extension and the insulation is terrible! We also put in good quality insulative underlay when we redid the floors. Also I run the dehumidifier upstairs drying clothes which massively increases the lecky bill but does pump out a lot of heat!

Continue with Ombudsman. I assume she is in massive credit. If so, cancel DD and make standing order for an appropriate amount eg £100/month

Do you have the original sash windows? If so internal double glazing might help. Something like this doesn’t look terrible and is easy to fit.

https://www.simplyplastics.com/catalog/products-by-use/plastic-secondary-glazing/acrylic-secondary-glazing/c-24/c-128/p-1075

I have noticed some people have freezing cold houses they are paying more than us on monthly DD. Get yourself an agreed DD then turn the heat up. It will make no difference to your bill it’s all a scam. I have mine on 5-8am then 3-9pm at 23degrees 5 bed detached house (30 years old so not really new either) and we pay £195 per month gas and electric combined. I know people pay £300 pcm and have their heating at 18 which never actually warms the house always freezing at their houses!

Also to add, internal insulation is s massive job and makes a total mess of your property. It’s great to do as part of a renovation whfn you’re ripping the place apart anyway but in isolation I think it would be prohibitively expensive and destructive.

What do you mean it's all a scam? surely you will get charged for the amount of electricity/gas/oil you use?

@AnnieG5 It doesn't work like that. You still pay for usage regardless of your deal.

Oh god, ours was hitting £15 or something ridiculous: three-storey edwardian terrace with timber-built top storey, uninsulated attic (we’re working on it!), single skin uninsulated lean-to utility at the back with single glazing and a shitty hollow core door that blows the gale into the rest of the house and sucks the heat out, and crap front door.

Previous owners relied on a single gas fire and put the minimum of radiators in so we have one under-window radiator in a 25sqm kitchen with aforementioned icy tundra utility attached.

Things that have helped: foil thingies behind radiators; thick interlined curtains (eBay plus Terry’s Fabrics and an evening on the Singer); thermal blinds if the windows have radiators beneath them (working on moving them all as curtains to the floor are better); door curtains at the front, back, utility and kitchen doors; insulating the top storey; hard-sole lined slippers and wool socks for everyone; draught strip stuff round the doors; keeping doors closed in the day to trap heat and closing curtains bang on dusk.

Unfortunately I cannot have fires, for the environment, and I must have bare sanded floorboards, for the aesthetic, so the No1 thing I have done is binned the smart meter tally, for my sanity. What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over!

Plus also I won my ombudsman case against Ovo and thus have a credit of a bajillion pounds to survive many winters.

£340 for both, 5 beds semi-detatched built 1920, working from home. But that includes charging EVs which I'd estimate at around £70 pcm.

No chimneys, all bricked up/removed which is a shame. Used to open windows for ventilation but now swear by a dehumidifier in winter (which emits heat as a by-product).

I wonder what the difference is between the old terraces and the newer ones that makes them so much more heat friendly; we're in a 1990s 3 bed mid terrace with new windows and our bill this winter has been £150 a month for both gas and elec, and our house has been 22 degrees almost 24/7.

This! 🙌🏼🙌🏼👌🏼 we have an 8 year old 4 bed detached (but not a tiny integral garage one!) Ours was built by a smallish independent local firm that build new houses to traditional proportions and styles. We keep the house at 20.5c when we are home and let it drop to 16c when out and we pay £200 a month year round, and use around £8 a day at the moment combined gas and electricity, including at least one load of washing and tumble drying per day. House is about 2,000 square feet.

Our energy usage averages £25 p/d in this kind of weather with thermostat at 14 overnight and 18 in the day. If it’s just me wfh though I turn off the central heating and have a small electric fan heater just for my office. It can save me £5+ p/d!! I also calm myself down by checking our month by month usage on the Octopus app. Lots of days in the summer we were down at £3 p/d so it really does even out. Jan and Feb are the worst months OP!!

Some great ideas and advice, thanks all 😃 thankfully it's much milder where we are today so the house isn't feeling so freezing. We've got one dehumidifier but might get another as agree about it being much harder to heat damp air. Will have a look at other energy companies but octopus have been really good with the customer service element - were with OVO before who as pp have mentioned were absolutely horrific

Our last house was a detached solid wall Victorian cottage. Beautiful house but like yours it never really got warm. We supplemented with gas fired log burner type stoves. Mid terrace fare a lot better than detached or end terrace but I think you have to be resigned to high bills. Might be worth experimenting with keeping heating on low to warm up the fabric of the house and see if it makes much difference in warmth and bills.

Reading this thread, I'm so glad I no longer live in my 1891 four bedroom terraced house. We never felt warm despite central heating, a coal fire and an extra heater in a small living room.

I'm now in a smaller new build semi. Gas and electricity are coming in at £60 a month and we've only been here since October, so no summer bills yet.

I have always lived in old houses. I have just accepted that the house is cold in winter. I also ventilate by opening windows and use dehumidifiers in necessary. We have heating on for a bit of the day but usually just concentrate one one living room for comfort heating with a log burner. I am fine with this and just accept I have to put on a lot of jumpers.

I can imagine that if/when I move to an insulated house, I will probably wonder why I chose to suffer all my life for the sake of aesthetics.

We’ve spent the last 2 years renovating our 1906 farmhouse. The best thing we did was place the insulation board internally then have it plastered over. It’s made the world of difference to retaining the heat. There’s one section of the house we haven’t done yet and I honestly don’t know how we coped before. I’d suggest doing it room by room as you are decorating. We also place a wood burner in the open hallway so the whole house benefits from the heat but we rarely need it now.

What did you use for the internal wall insulation? Am looking to do similar but want an effective product that won't compromise breathability of the house!

We used kingspan insulation boarding with a damproof membrane underneath. We’d had problems with damp in our living room so originally did it to rectify that but couldn’t believe the difference when it was done so just did the rest of the home as we were renovating. It was only needed on the external stone walls. Older houses have less ventilation so think of dry heating source (ie not gas stoves). We’ve rectified mould issues in bedrooms etc too with this( from showers). I’m delighted after 10 years of pulling my hair out!

We're in a detached 3 bed old style Victorian with high ceilings etc. Energy costs have been around £450 past couple months. Compared with £200-250 over the summer.

Yep we used to live in a Victorian end terrace and exactly this - we were about £10 a day to stay comfortable but I was at home a lot on mat leave. Since moved house! We also had old single glazed windows and if we had stayed in the house longer we’d have had to replace as you could feel the drafts whistling through. One thing that helped was getting a dehumidifier especially when drying clothes inside as dry air heats a lot faster than damp air. We were also considering a tado system for the radiators to make it easier to focus heat where needed rather than heating empty rooms.

but at the end of the day it is what is is. Need to spend a lot of money on windows and insulation to get those kind of houses warm.