Astronimical leccy bill – is this normal???

[BoiledOwl]

Our Smart meter is telling us we're spending about £25 per day on electricity. Our house is larger than average and houses 3 adults and 2 children, but we're very frugal, turn off lights, turn off stuff at the plugs, iar dry on clothes horse where possible etc.

Is this in any way normal???

Trying to get through to supplier is impossible at the moment, but I'm convinced there must be some kind of mistake. We're being very cautious with central heatinf and gas is more like £4 or £5 per day.

Have you looked at eg your hourly consumption online? You should be able to at least pinpoint spikes etc.

Two showers, one load of washing and no excessive background usage over the course of a morning shouldn't be using 21kwh.

Ouch!
Did you use the same amount of electricity?

It's unlikely they'll revise your past bills from e7 to single unfortunately.

I think you have two different issues.

One is the rate is higher than it should be and you are not using economy 7 to any advantage so not worth the premium on peak rate

But on top of that you seem to be getting thrown awful lot of electric so either something is wrong with the smart metre or something is running that you are not aware of.

While I don't think you should be on Economy 7 for your circumstances, you don't want to find out you are paying three times as much if you have a vampire draw somewhere

My average morning use is about 2kwh and even with a storage heater I'm only just over 20 per day for comparison

As pps say, 50p /kWh istoo high -even our 'green,' provider has now put us down from 50p to 35p.

But 20kWh by lunchtime in a gas heated house is insane! That suggests something is running at 2kW constantly which is more than an oven! It would be noticeably hot if this was a real power use. It is surely a mistake?

For comparison our (warm) 4-bed detached is electrically heated (heat pump) and we have only used 10kWh so far today - and that included a load of laundry as well.

My entire weekly usage including 3 loads of washing and drying came to 20wkh last week. I'm in a flat on my own, and a fairly low user but still...

We're spending about £14-£15 a day on gas plus electric at the moment, well-insulated 4 bed extended semi detached house. Three adults, two teenagers, loads of devices, and there is someone in nearly all of the time wfh, and we use the tumble drier as there is just too much damp washing hanging about all the time if we don't. Having the heating on a bit in the morning then late afternoon/evening until about 8.30pm.

Are you with SSE or OVO by any chance?

Op says Scottish Power.

No that can't be right! Ours is running at about £4 per day at the moment. In a fairly large house.

For info, electric showers are usually about 10kW so to rack up the mystery 20 so kWthe shower would have to run continuously for up to 2 hours. I assume this hasn't happened 😮

Oops @NewBootsAndRanty sorry didn't see that bit

You're on an E7 tarrif when you really shouldn't be, they're for places that can use the majority of electricity overnight (night storage heaters) - you're paying a premium for a feature you can't make use of.

Get off the E7 tarrif as soon as possible, you will save a small fortune in doing so even if there's something else amiss with your electric use.

What's your electricity consumption in KWh? That will help make an apples to apples comparison.

If you're on E7 check that you don't have two immersion heaters (very common for there to be an "off peak" heater at the bottom of the tank for the main hot water, and a second "peak rate" heater at the top of the tank to top up the hot if it runs low). You may have an additional element gobbling up the daytime expensive electric.

We did an electric usage exercise here. Took an hour but it was worth it. Turned everything off. And I mean everything -all plugs, boiler, fridge.

Then we turned each item on and recorded kw expenditure before turning off and moving on. We also monitored the cost of different machine cycles.

It was really interesting worthwhile. We now tend to spend below £3 a day. There are 5 of us and we tumble dry and use the washing machine every day.

Worth doing if you have a smart meter.

Thanks so much all – it looks like a) it hasn't been great because we've been on E7 and shouldn't be, but then b) around 1 November last year something goes screwy and our usage pKwh shoots up from av. 25-30 per day to sometimes over 50. Scottish Power have contacted us because we @ them on Twitter, so we'll see how this sh*t-show unfolds...

Scottish Power billed me at a different rate than agreed due to a miscommunication on their part. It took me several hours on the phone, split over 3 days, but they did finally credit the difference back to my account. This was after at least 3 of their staff told me there was nothing that could be done. So if they try that, don't let them fob you off.

So if your are on e7 tarff and being billed 50p per kWh then moving to standard tariff @ 35p per kWh will reduce your usage from £25 per day to

(0.35/0.5)x£25=£17.50

(assuming all your usage is during the high rate period).

That still implies you are using about 50 kWh per day (ignoring the standing charge) which is a lot, a constant consumption of about 2kW over the whole day.

You mention that your background consumption was around 0.2 kW (200W) so there is clearly something consuming a lot of electricity.

The only things that can use this much generally tend to be things like heaters.

So immersion heaters, electric radiators, hot tubs, oven possibly if you have it on for long periods, tumble dryer.

Monitor your smart meter and see when it switches from the background (200W?) to the much higher consumption, then identify the device.

To use that much 50kwh is crazy
my electric can sometimes be as high as 30
kwh but that’s normally when I’ve used the hot tub a few times
average is around 20 - 25kwh a day for my electric

to be using 50kwh you have something that is eating your electric

tumble dryers
emersion heaters left on
electric showers being used but as someone said it would have to be used for around 2hrs a day

I suggest going round room by room to see exactly what appliances are in use in each. Gaming computers can be relatively high usage ( though not enough to account alone for yours). If you've turned your heating down, is one of the children using a sneaky heater? Just a thought, do not wish to malign DC, but you have to consider everything. Clearly something is accounting for it. You'll sort it.

It's also worth checking the wattage of all your light bulbs.

Some older spotlight bulbs can consume quite a lot as can desk lamps.