Smartmeters

[BottomlessPit]

We had a crazily high G&E bill last month. Despite being with Octopus over a year they haven’t managed to get us a smart meter. Ive messaged them again this week.
Ive been taking photos of our electricity reader to try to work out manually the cost of things. Overnight we used 16 kWh with no lights on, and I can’t for the life of me work out on what!! We have an American fridge freezer and phones on charge.
Any advice on working out how to see what devices use what in the absence of a smart meter?! And what the heck used our elec last night?! Thank you

Anything that makes heat are the biggest users of energy. Did you have the dishwasher on overnight? I expect your fridge does use up a lot of electricity too. Ours is pretty small and it's the biggest user of electricity overnight.

Have you seen the plug-in energy monitors? Cost about £15 off eBay/Amazon. You can plug in individual appliances and see how much they use.

We've put smart plugs on half the things that are plugged in at the back of the TV and on all the gadgets in my DSs room and switch them off at night. It's reduced our night usage a lot!

American fridge freezers are not that power hungry, it shouldn’t really give you 16 kWh overnight. Not sure if it could give you that figure if it’s faulty tho. Can you check if the compressor is operating all the time? When it’s on, you can hear a little noise coming from the freezer. It’s not meant to be on continuously, it just maintains the temperature to -18C or whatever. Phone chargers are negligible.
I got an American fridge freezer and the manual says it consumes an average of 423kW a YEAR. Our yearly electricity consumption is 1400 kW, so about a third of it is the freezer.
You could benefit from the cold weather, unplug the freezer for overnight and store some food (that you can) in the garden and see what are the electricity readings in the morning.

Apparently american fridge freezers can use up to 50% more energy than a regular fridge freezer.

Could you have an immersion water heater on without realising?
as other say buy the plug in and check what your appliances are using.

I have some rather cranky 1st generation smart meters, but the electric one usually manages to work for a week or 2 before skipping a few hours. On Sunday, with 2 loads of washing and cooking a roast and the dishwasher (plus TV and lights etc) we used 14.19 kWh. We have a tall fridge-freezer and another small fridge and freezer.

Are you sure the fridge-freezer door is shut properly/does it need a new seal? How do you heat the house (and is there an immersion heater or heated towel rails that somebody has forgotten to switch off)? Could anybody else be tapping into your supply.

Otherwise (ideally 2 of you) need to set aside an hour and start by turning things off to see what is using the power. Sadly that does mean that one of you will be stood taking meter readings every 10 minutes.

I bought an energy monitor and discovered the old fridge and freezers we had (thinking I was being all environmentally friendly by not replacing things unnecessarily) were using £750 a year to run.

The other thing that was running away with electricity was a dehumidifier but I found a lot of things around the house were drawing power in standby (washing machine, oven, dishwasher, printers). We have subsequently bought Tapo smart plugs for things that are awkward to switch off manually or can be automated to turn on at different times, and swapped a lot of bulbs to very low energy LED (1-3w for the millions of spotlights we have). It’s been expensive but everything should save enough money to pay for itself in 2 years. Our usage has come down from 25kw a day to around 10kw.

Tapo make a smart plug that also acts as an energy monitor so you could reuse that once you’ve completed a check of everything around the house. Other monitors may be available 🙂

If you switch off your freezer, things will not defrost overnight assuming you don’t keep opening the door - but an energy monitor is a better bet. Also, don’t be tempted to turn off your router when you’re not using it as the line will be assessed as faulty and you’ll get lower speeds as the broadband line tries to balance what it sees as a fault.

Thank you for all the advice. I’ll have a look at the plug things as I hadn’t heard of those and they sound really useful.
I’m a bit embarrassed to admit, the electricity use was because my husband plugged in the car overnight and I hadn’t even thought of that! 😳😳🙈 It’s good to know the price of charging the car tho I guess!!
Despite that, I’ll be using all the advice here as we still need to reduce our use and work out what is energy-hungry and not. THANK YOU for all the replies x