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 😭

If I was you I would set a day aside and check your appliances/usage etc one by one so that you are 100% certain of what's going on.

Start off by turning everything which uses electric (inc fridge, freezer, boiler etc) off completely. Look at the kwh usage on your smart meter - it should be at 0. Then check the meter outside - it should also be at 0.

If they aren't at 0 then you need to search the house to try and find what else is still on.

Once they are at 0 then turn one electric thing on (eg fridge). Look at the smart meter and note usage. Then turn off and do the next thing. Do it for everything electric in your house. Compare usage to standard usages from the internet and see if any are higher than usual.

Once you have a list of anything which seems higher than usual that'll give you a good starting point for where to look.

For what its worth my guess would be that there is something running in the background (fridge, pet heater?) which is using way more electric than it should because your morning figure looks quite high to me.

He said now your boiler will only heat the water when you turn the tap on, that will save you approximately £3 a day

I noticed that with my boiler - I changed the setting to Eco

I don't think it saves that many kWh though - £3 a day is 30 kWh - probably more like 2 - 3 kWh - but it's still money- but I can certainly see that it doesn't fire up at random times like it used to so that's good

I think that Octopus have their heart in the right place but they are administratively incompetent. I have been asking them to swap me to a standard rate from Economy 7 for nearly a year. More amusingly, their own bills

show my day time electricity usage (and rate) under the heading of "Night" and vice-versa for my night time usage. Again, I have been telling them to fix this for nearly a year and they still haven't. I can bear the small extra cost, but if they have't sorted things out after a year then I'll report them to Ofgem.

I wouldn't worry about laptop use. I have stand up table, monitor and permanently plugged in laptop and it uses only about 0.22kwh a day!

I agree with others you need to check your actual meter, not just the display and take stock for few days. 25kwh a day is 5x more than what we use and we have work set up, lights on, microwave daily, disheasher, tv on in the evening for hours etc.
Heating on 2x, sometimes 3x a day (old condense boiler) and it comes to about 3-3.50 a day. Admittedly house never goes under 16 as it's insulated. Includes Cooking and showers.

Most things on standby eat VERY negligible amount. Unless you have 700 chargers, it eill not even register.

I would turn main switch off for 2 hours, it will not harm fridge freezer and see if it keeps moving. Then go fuse by fuse to see which room has the issue. Unless it's just your display being wrong.

@CinnamonSwirl82 was this ever solved? I would hope it was.

@2catsandhappy a thick black cable fell down between next doors and ours. Happened back in April. Ever since their our bills have dropped to ~£100pm for gas and electricity.

I did start investigating it with Octopus but it was starting to take over my life so I decided to just leave it now things have settled down.

We have the air conditioner on in our room all night, can run the dish washer & washing machine and use approx. £2.50-£4.00 per day for both gas & electricity.

Something was definitely up but it's back to normal now!

So you saying somehow neighbours hooked into your supply ?

@Blondeshavemorefun Possibly.... probably? Hard to prove

Did you at least manage to get a refund for some of the overpayments?

@CrabbiesGingerBeer nope! I would've had to have proven that it stolen by next door which, given the cable had gone, it would've been near impossible. Just cut my losses and admire how much richer I am these days haha.

Get thermal curtains and close the windows to keep the heat in, keep doors closed

Glad you got this resolved, OP.

For anyone reading this coming up to winter, after lots of testing, we discovered last winter that our bathroom towel radiators were using around 8kwh a day each. They're not even really good enough to heat a room if you turn them on to pre-heat a room, so we turned them all off completely. They were costing around £8 a day in electric between the three of them.