First gas bill with heating on

[Pootle40]

So we had our first gas bill (we pay monthly) through. For a five week period we used £175 of gas 🤬 (incl standing charge). It's a large 4 bed though to be fair.

That's keeping a house at 19.5c at periods only with it timed for 1 hour on waking, 4 hours at night but not actually 'on' that whole time. It's a fairly efficient house and during day thermostat (hive) is never dropping below 17.8c yet so it's not like it's needing to heat a huge margin. Quite scary really. Our showers are run from boiler and we don't have any baths. Water heated a few hours a day.

Was 1560kwh for those 5 weeks. I reckon our annual usage is 13,000-14,000kwh

I really dont think that's bad. I have a small 3 bed ( 3rd bedtime is too small for a normal single sized bed ) and I spend £30 a week on my gas.

Can you just heat the water for one hour per day and have a max of five mins each in the shower

how about turning the heating off but putting it on timer at 5:30-6:30 am

evening 5-6:30

You should expect significant seasonal variation and for it to be a lot in winter.

We use slightly less and are with Octopus. They have a predictor on the website that shows the monthly variation and November and February are about that amount, and around £200 in December and January.

But the prediction for June to September is about £30 a month so it all balances out over the year.

We have the water on for 30 minutes for two people

Ours is £178 a month and not had heating on yet!!

Our house is 13 degrees, I am freezing all the time. Electric is £195 a month. I found my smart meter so plugged it in. It is showing 10p a hour with only the WiFi and fridge freezer on. This can’t be right can it?!

What size house, how many people, you in or out all day ?

Experiment with how long you need to heat to water for. We have an enormous hot water tank heated by an oil boiler, and only need to heat it for one hour a day in the morning and we have endless hot water all day.

We are about to submit November's readings 😱 in October I think we had the heating on for 3 hours total over the month and our bill was £100 for gas. We are high users though approx 22000 a year, well it was that before we started to try to cut down, big old draughty house, inefficient boiler, seperate hot water tank that stays warm for only about 6 hours and doesn't even hold enough for a full bath so need to keep flicking hot water on to heat.

It’s 4 bedroom semi.

I wfh but don’t really use any power, I will charge my phone, do one quick wash a day, quick cycle dishwasher everyday, oven on about every 3 days.

I struggle to see how you can get a bill that big without using heating.

I make £178 equal to about 1500 kWh per month, or 55 kWh per day.

Without heating I can easily get by on about 4 kWh per day, so you are using about 15x that in gas, which is an enormous amount unless you are operating a chip shop out of your living room.

@GasPanic that's sounds right as we used 1560kwh and our bill was £175.

That's got to be a gas leak surely? 4kw a day would be plenty for hot water and the stovetop.

We have a large 4/5 bed house. 2 adults, 3DC. Someone is home all day every day. Our combined gas and electric last month was £470.

Makes me sick.

Yeah - but you were using heating !

What was your bill before you switched the heating on ?

My gas bill says "high" gas usage is 46.5 kWh per day. I assume that that is averaged over the entire year.

They are using 55 kWh per day (10 kWh more than high) before they have turned on the heating so god knows what it would be like if they turn the heating on.

Maybe the meter is wrong, they have a gas leak or we're chatting with the owner of a country estate.

Have looked at bill and it was £220 electric and £250 gas.

Agreed @GasPanic maybe that individual is quoting quarterly usage ?! Not sure of our usage pre heating but reckon since we started putting it on it's added c. £100 per month so far.......

Although this bills covers a few weeks when (unbeknown to us) our previous thermostat wasn't wired back in when we got our new boiler in January. We now have a closely managed hive! So it could well be I used more in October than I actually needed

14,000 kWh for a large 4-bed is pretty good.

I've got spreadsheets going back five years so I know that my gas use goes up between six and ten fold in winter. Not the two or three times I think people assume.

I'm not extravagant, I have an hour in the morning and two in the evening, and I WFH but don't put it on during the day.

It's never been that much of an issue in the past, I just paid the DD and it was smoothed out over the year and I never really looked at the bills or usage much. Until now, when it's gone up so much. I use about £5-6 a day, gas and electric combined, when the heating is on. About £4 of that is from the heating, because it was about £2 a day before (using the oven ramps it right up).

I've worked out that a shower costs c20p, so shorter showers really won't make much difference (I do have one of those water and gas efficient shower heads though).

@Workinghardeveryday that seems very high.
Is it a very old fridge feeezer? Are you sure you don't have something else on (do you have an immersion heater?)

Have you tried turning off the trips for everything and then checking your meter? And then turn on trips one by one to see which area of the house triggers it to go up. Then you might find what is using a lot.

Our 'background use' (fridge freezer, router, burglar alarm, 4 small alarm clocks, thermostat/timer for the boiler) is about 3p an hour.
My monthly bills on the new prices -5 bed, 5 people living here, sometimes at home during the day, cooking on electric- are about £100 a month.

The new price cap for April is being announced this week. At least it will be warmer then, but God knows what we will be paying by next winter.

My house is between 2p and 4p an hour with nothing on except fridge, freezer, router, and stuff on standby.

10p does sound a lot.

Do you mean this week eg today or tomorrow or next week? I'm nervous, our provider is an eco one so exempt from the cap we didn't know this when we signed up obviously! But so far they seem to be sticking to the cap roughly we are currently on a fix of 10p and 34p. But we use so much gas and electric that we are paying far more than the "average user" quotes in the price cap figures etc

The OP says it is on a timer. One hour morning, four hours evening. I'm sure she knows she can run it for a shorter period of time to cost less.

The amount you use will vary massively depending on the type o house and how energy efficient it is.