Oddly low gas usage

[Kilicat]

Apologies for another energy bill thread. Like many I am trying to budget properly for our winter energy and finding our situation a bit odd and hoping other can shed some light on it.

We have moved house over the summer and our expected has bill has risen from £380/yr to £3100/yr. I've looked closely and see that in addition to the price increases our expected use has also increased from c.8000 kwh per year to nearly 29000 kwh/yr. However, when I look at our most recent bills (both based on meter readings and not estimates), from Sept 1 until 23rd October, we've used around 8kwh for the entire time (the bill has done the calculations and states that we've used on average 0.3 kwh/day). So this has left me hugely confused - both the insanely high predicted annual use (3 times higher than last yr) and the oddly low use in the last 2 months or so (way lower than last year and much lower than any use I've come across online). I know that ultimately our actual use is what gets billed for so ultimately we'll pay the correct price but I'm really struggling to work out how much to budget for....Octopus wants to put my DD up to £375 (up from £71/mm a few months back) but I'm wondering if this is really necessary as can't imagine our use will hit 28000 kwh. I could really use some of that money for other expenses but equally don't want to end up with an enormous bill by the end of the winter. Can anyone offer any thought on this situation? Is our predicted use being influenced by the previous owners habits (from the nest we inherited I can see they had the thermostat set for 21C most of the time and at least one of them worked from home so likely they used significantly more heating than we will, we also inherited a gas leak when we moved in so I'm wondering if that may have upped the gas use?).

For context - we are a family of four and consider us to be quite frugal but we do live in a four bed Victorian semi with single glazed windows. However, we are all out every day from 7.45-5 and all eat our main meal at school/work, so low cooking done during the week (gas hob, electric oven). We have our hot water on (gas boiler with a tank) for one hour per day which seems enough for our needs and could perhaps try to reduce this further). Heating has only been on a few hours since we moved in, mainly when DH was sick and off work for a few days).

Sorry, just to be clear - all of the numbers in the post refer to gas only.

8kwh for that period seems way too low - in September we used 246kwh of gas, with no heating on - is the meter working? Our water meter stopped recently but we didn’t notice for a long time!

Our estimated annual consumption is about 16000kwh, but we’re pretty miserly with the heating so the previous owners of your house could easily have used 28000 if they liked it warm.

I think your usage is being estimated from the previous occupants.

When you say 0.3 kWh this is very low and I think impossible. But do you actually mean 0.3 kWh or do you mean 0.3 m3 on the meter ? Remember the meter is in m3 not kWh.

Because 0.3 m3 on the meter is very low, but I think not entirely implausible. I use this amount per day in summer.

What is your electricity bill like ? Are you using the electric immersion heater to heat the water, meaning that hardly any gas is being used ?

The gas leak you mention is hopefully a factor in previously overstated hills?
I would also check the immersion heater isn’t in and you are instead using electric to heat the water (we were doing this without realising)..

Our intial gas and electricity bill was estimated using previous occupants actual usage. After the first quarter, they seem to be based on our actual usage, with a factored in percentage increase for the winter months. So like you, we wet originally predicted a frighteningly high cost, which has subsequently dropped as we are both very frugal with both gas and electric.

The previous occupants usage (including gas leak) is probably what your predicted usage is based on. Pretty sure it'll even out in the next few months. Our seller happily told us they used £80pm energy when we purchased eight years ago. Before prices started going up the most our monthly dd got to was £65pm.

@ShipwreckSunset - let's hope the leak was a factor. It's possible there had been a slow leak for ages. We do have an immersion heater as well which was on when we moved it but I turned it off after a few weeks when I realised (first electric bill was definitely quite a bit higher).

@Alphabet1spaghetti2 interesting to hear yours was based on previous occupants. We've kept the same supplier so I'm surprised they don't take known use as a factor!

@SlipperyLizard I am a bit concerned the meter is not working properly. Is there any way to definitively tell? I don't want to end up running up an unknown debt that will come along as a nasty surprise.@GasPanic I've double checked this a few times but Octopus seem to provide the kwh info directly on the bills so no room for calculation error. I've attached a couple of screenshots just in case I'm missing something?

Do you have a gas hob? I guess you could run it & see whether the meter turns? Our water meter wasn’t turning at all - it then took a few months after reporting it to be replaced, I don’t think they charged us properly for water (undercharged) for that period

@Kilicat
Your bill is showing your usage in cubic feet, check your meter to see if it an actually an imperial one. If you have a metric meter then the conversion of units would give you a kWh use of somewhere around 10 which I think is more realistic.

@SlipperyLizard good idea....just turned the heating on and all (7!) gas burners on the hob. It definitely started to go round.

@Geminio good thought. Just checked it definitely says ft3 on the meter.

The bill had an estimated opening reading. Presumably this was over-estimated, so you paid more last month. So you have the previous bill, what does this show?

Keep taking and supplying meter readings, so that your bills are accurate rather than estimated.

So you have = Do you have

Your first reading is estimated ?

You used 24.2 units in 23 days.

It is now 28th, so if you are using gas at the same rate it should read :

(24.2/23)*5+2532 = 2537.

If your meter reads much more than this now it implies your initial estimate is wrong ?

@hedgehoglurker last bill seems similar tbh. The estimated reading is for one day (?) Which is strange. I've attached the previous bill which is for 53 days both based on meter readings.

Thing I don't understand is that you have an old meter, cubic feet.

Yet it implies that you have only used 80m3 of gas since the start (2485/31) ?

My meter is in m3 and is 20 years old and shows 18000 m3 !

Maybe you are reading the meter incorrectly ?

Do you have a photo ?

I guess the meter could have looped round, but it just seems really weird that if it is such an old meter (cubic feet) it shows such a tiny amount of gas on it.

@Kilicat fwiw. Your gas usage seems very similar to ours. Combined gas and electric bill averages between £48 - £55 per month on a meter, read every 1st of the month.

Here is a photo of the meter taken a few days ago. I edited out the meter number just in case it's somehow it's identifying.

How much hot water do you use from the tank? Do your showers use it or are they electric? Maybe you are using so little water that it doesn’t need much to keep the tank hot.

In the summer with hot water on for 1.5 hours a day and a gas hob which is used daily we are averaging 20kWh per day.

@GasPanic it says 2535 this evening so pretty similar to your prediction and we've used less this week than last. The estimate on that bill is very accurate - I'm not sure why they've done that the day before at the end of the last bill was a meter reading.

I have an identical situation OP- our gas is hardly going up at all-my bill for electric and gas is hitting around£110 a month and£90 or so of that is electric (this is submitting readings to octopus too every few weeks) big 4 bed detached-very well insulated , gas heating which has been in on in fits and starts every day for a month . I honestly think our meter has been knobbled or something!! Still- we are moving next month so hey ho!! All readings submitted and amounts deducted not based on estimates - hence I am hugely in credit.

@Alphabet1spaghetti2 - that's reassuring that it's not totally beyond the realms of possibility.

@Geminio we hardly used any tbh - DH has one shortish shower daily (although he's been away a bit so less than usual). I shower every other day and our 2 youngish kids try to dodge any form of washing as far as is possible (so brief showers twice per week with flannel washes in between). I've only been putting the water on for one hour per day and have yet to run out. We have a dishwasher so don't really need hot water for washing up. The 7 ring job we inherited only gets low usage as we're not cooking main meals 5/7 days.

@Kilicat

I think your reading is correct. It's a different type of meter to mine, so it obviously loops round.

I don't understand why you are using so little gas. Gas boilers are normally around 24kw so 6 kWh corresponds to a boiler being on for about 15 minutes total. In almost 2 months !

To heat up a 150 litre cylinder of water from cold to hot varies depending on temperature, but I would guess around 10 kWh would be the sort of amount you might expect to use doing that. So if you did that every day it would be 300 kWh per month. I use about 100 kWh a month and I am pretty frugal. You are using 6 kWh a month !

Something is not right somewhere - unless you are not doing any water heating.

Even if you were only using gas burners on the cooker I think you would be hard pressed to get 6kWh. I think the burners are of the order 1 kWh or so, so you would get around 6 hours of burner time for 6kWh, or about 12 mins a day for a month.

Stupid question maybe, but are you sure the showers are fed from the hot water tank and not electric ?

We have very low gas usage for a family of 4 due to similar reasons - most meals eaten at school/work/relatives, and most often use air fryer and microwave. Our monthly usage is usually 200kwh during warmer months and up to 900kwh in the winter. Yours definitely does not seem right!