Can't afford to keep the house warm - £800 p/m?!

[CinnamonSwirl82]

I'm cold, I'm miserable, I'm skint.

Tried heating the house to maintain 18 across the day and it cost £25. Even turning it on for an hour in the morning (doesn't heat anything) and an hour in the evening pre-bed costs us £15 a day. We keep all the lights off, everything is turned off at the plug and we now just use the biofuel fireplace for heat/light in the evening. All for the cheap price of £11 a day.

I'm feeling absolutely miserable that I have to sit in a cold, dark house and spend £350 p/m for the pleasure of it. Thats over £4k per year. It's only myself and my partner so we don't need to keep the house warm for kids and we can sit in the dark with a couple of candles/fireplace. We live in a 3 bed semi 1970s build.

How is this right? Where on earth did the government pull their figure of £2.5k bill for the average family from? We're less than the average family living in the average home.

I'm contemplating getting in to debt just so it doesn't feel like my nose is going to fall off my face and my joints stop hurting 😭

@Wheretheskyisblue is £2 for hot water for only one bath normal? It sounds expensive to me but we only had a mains fed shower at the old house so I've no idea what it costs to fill a bath.

A boiler is normally about 24 kw up to about 42kw for a really big one. How long was it running to heat your water? If it ran for 1 hour £1.90 would be about right, although it will have heated more water than what is needed for 1 bath. Do you have a hot water cylinder somewhere?

Filling my bath normally uses about 5-10kwh of gas.

Just to agree with others that your tariff sounds like an odd choice. E7 is designed for electric night storage heating/hot water. Plus if you were out at Christmas and didn't have anything switched on (that you know of) and still used £8 there's something not right.

@ChangedmynameagainforChristmas I'm not ever putting the heating on? I sit in a 10.5 degree house all day because I can't afford to. Other than putting the fire on for 2 hours in the evening which isn't fuelled by the boiler or electrics.

I have joint problems and yes, this temperature is bad for them and yes, I can feel my bones grinding against each other and it hurts like a b*h but I can't afford to heat the house and spend £800p/m.

I WFH and live in fluffy slippers and an oodie and it is somehow still costing me £350 a month to sit in a dark cold house. I at least want to be warm for that amount!!

Gas seems ok, electric is v high

I WFH, not stingy with heating but careful!
My average electric is about 5.5kwh a day

Yep.

OP read your meter and turn everything apart from your fridge/freezer off at the wall socket. This includes your microwave and oven.

There is something using your electricity that you don't know about.

OP...sounds like you've got a meter problem! Just as an aside, a heated throw is brilliant for aching joints. They typically cost about 3p an hour to run and for me it's been a game changer. I now only put the heating on once or twice a week as I'm toasty under the throw.

@CinnamonSwirl82 Just for comparison, on Monday we had the heating on for just over 3 hours and had 2 baths plus 2 showers (28 mins hot water) and it was £10.59 for the day including the standing charges.

@stopringingme I asked them to take us off it and they ignored us 😭

Everything is switched off bar the few things I've mentioned above. I really can't see them using, let's say, £8 of electric a day just being on standby.

The heating is gas and isn't a lower tariff during the night so wouldn't make a difference.

It's why we got a 0.75kwh heater that we can stick in a room for 30 mins to heat it up. Trying to avoid damp. It should cost no more than 25p an hour to run during the day - £4.50 if we used it 18 hours a day during peak prices (which we don't ☹️).

OP your electric bill sounds way off, and it needs checking and sorting out, wishing you luck there.

Just to mention, although my bills are not high and I am at home most days in Winter bar an outing to the shops/for a walk etc. (retired and old haha), I have a bottle gas super ser type heater for the kitchen area which is where I spend most of my time!

It is absolutely brilliant. Apart from the initial outlay of buying the heater and the first bottle, it is so economical and as I pay in advance for the replacement bottle (about 30 quid) I don't worry about daytime heating. In fact it is so good for space heating that I have to turn it off several times a day and the residual heat is very good. I then turn on the central heating in the evenings for about two hours or more if it's really Baltic. I just looked it up and bought it in September, had to replace the bottle last weekend! I am not frugal with it, it just works very well.

I did have to get used to the "fumey" nature of the heater, but that soon disappeared, and I have a carbon monoxide detector in the room too. But these heaters now have safety features anyway. I highly recommend, and every home should have one even if just in the event of a power cut.

If you think your meter is faulty, you'll normally be asked to take 7 days of readings at the same time each day.

For reference, this is what Loop published as average gas and electric usage for different property sizes and occupancy:

@fruitbrewhaha only cause it takes the sky box a good while to 'initialize' or whatever it calls it once it's been switched off at the plug.

I'm too impatient to sit and watch it load for 30 mins 😅

@CinnamonSwirl82 you need to call them rather than emailing them

Only 3p an hour?! Will probably be about 50p an hour with my stupid meter but my god I'm freezing and close to breaking down 😭 will definitely invest in one if it's legitimately only 3p an hour.

I've been really unwell over the last two months and this is just making it a million times worse. I can't stop bleeding downstairs (currently being investigated for cervical cancer) and I think the blood loss is also making me a lot colder and it's not helping 😭 I'm so stressed.

@CinnamonSwirl82 If you've already asked to change tariff and it's been ignored, give them a call and raise a complaint. They should be able to switch you and backdate billing to whenever you originally requested the switch.

@NewBootsAndRanty thank you!!

So we should be about £2.5k - £208 on average a month. And I'm assuming that's with being allowed some heating & light 😅

I'm going to ring them I think and demand they send someone round to investigate. Based on what everyone is saying it really seems like something is wrong.

OP my bills are like yours and we’re a house of two. 60s semi bungalow. Currently freezing!

@NewBootsAndRanty but will we get charged more as our day rate is 44p but we're also getting a discount for government price guarantee. so we're paying 33p (or 36 now?) During the day and 15p at night.

Don't want to shoot myself in the foot.

Before they'll investigate anything they'll probably ask you to do a few things

www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/energy/energy-supply/your-energy-meter/find-out-if-your-energy-meter-is-faulty/

The 33pish cap is for the standard tariff. E7 has a different (higher) cap

Don't worry about leaving the Sky box, TV or anything similar on standby, they cost nothing to run, tens of pounds a year at most.

Octopus are normally very good, so I'm surprised they're not helping you.
I would make a uisance of myself and insist on being taken away from Economy 7 if you don't have storage heaters or an electric car as that is part of, but not all of the problem.

Send them an official request and if they don't comply in 8 weeks, complain to OFGEM.

However, the rates are less of an issue than your very very high electricity use, so that is what you should investigate. You seem to be using over 3 times the average amount for a household that has other forms of heating as well.

Most of the annual cost for most people will be due to their heating and hot water. Do you have previous readings to show your usage pattern over time and has this changed?

But your usage cannot possibly be correct. Even 17kwh for a bath sounds too high.

You have to use quite a chunk of your daily amount in the cheap period for it to be worth having E7, hence it only really being suitable for storage heaters and electric cars. Inconveniencing yourself by doing your washing in the middle of the night is unlikely to be enough on it's own.

Havr a look at the total kwh youve used for electric and work out what it would have cost at the standard single rate.

If you log into your Octopus account or app it should also show your current unit rates including VAT.

Do you have storage heaters or radiators? You shouldn’t be on economy 7 with radiators. Storage heaters are a totally different beast