Outrageously high gas & electricity bills

[ToRecordOnlyWater]

Anyone else noticing their bills skyrocket in the past 6 months?
Switched from ScottishPower as the bills were getting really high, now with Octopus in the hopes of reducing them a bit. Just input my first set of readings since switching and my account is now -£382!

I am on maternity leave so in the house a lot, I’ve been trying to do things like switch off lights, heating off as much as possible but the house is naturally very cold. Tried shutting doors, draught excluder by the front door so can’t get my head around it getting higher!

Just hoping I’m not alone in this, feeling quite sick at how high it is. Resenting the fact that I’m having to look at going back to work earlier than planned to ensure we have extra money to do things like a little day out a month.

What do you guys find to be the biggest drain on your gas and electricity? I don’t have a smart meter so not sure why the harder I try to keep the cost down, the more it goes up! Property is a terrace built in the 60s. Is this just what energy costs are now? Makes me want to cry that half my maternity pay goes on this one big bill every month 😭😭

Anyone In a similar boat would be amazing as feels like I’m the only person paying this much that I’ve spoken to, and any advice on good ways to save energy would be appreciated. Run the washing machine probably once every 2 days, water heater only turned on when we need it, dishwasher runs once a day but would struggle to cut this down. Thanks in advance x

I agree with pp that it varies tremendously from house to house.

DH & I live in a 2 bed Vicorian terrace. Both retired so gas ch on 7am to 11pm, every day currently. Set at 19° daytime, 15 overnight.

Our gas and electric are supplied by BG standard tariff and pay by variable DD, so each month we pay for actual useage in the previous month, I submit readings online every month.

Washing machine on twice a week. Tumble around 1 1/2 hours pw.
Don't have a dishwasher. Oven on around 3 times a week.

Yet the highest bills, in the coldest month, were £130 gas and £58 electric.

I did read somewhere that American style FF are very expensive and we don't have one of those.

It all seems very very variable even with the same situations.

@GasPanic thank you for your message yesterday and suggestion to check the meter. I've got home and looked on the meter but can't for the life of me see that it has either m3 or ft3x100 anywhere. I've taken a picture in the hope you know where to look? If you have time to check I'd very much appreciate it. I'm crossing my fingers that it isn't a leak!

Your gas isn't that bad, considering how high you have the thermostat set. I set mine at about 19 degrees max and turn it off overnight, and pay slightly less than you during the coldest months (2-bedroom house).

However, my electricity is a lot lower than yours and I use the washing machine and tumble dryer a lot (no dishwasher). Cooking is via gas oven, hobs and air fryer/microwave. No water heater as I have a combi boiler.

I have a smart meter and it made me more aware of what appliances cost to run, which does help if you want to keep your bills down.

I pay £80 a month for a 2 bed flat & I'm loads in credit. They tried to drop my DD to £5 a month but I put it straight back to what I was paying.

This sounds strange. We were away all January and had heating set for 15 degrees all the time. I had it boosted for 2 hours x 2 visits when my cleaner came. I used 280kw (£20.86) for that month for gas.

That looks like an electric meter not the gas.

@GasPanic which would be why I couldn't see it. I think the gas is outside (since having the Smart meter I've probably wrongly assumed I don't need to look at it). I'll have another look, thank you!

@ToRecordOnlyWater You say you're in a 60s house, so have you had a poke about in the loft to see how much insulation there is up there? I presume your landlord had to provide an EPC rating of E or lower, and one of the easiest ways to reduce the EPC rating is to add more loft insulation. Obviously if you've only thin insulation, then that'll be your heat loss. If you could do with more it's not that expensive to DIY. I would contact the landlord, and make him aware that the loft insulation is insufficient and see if he would be willing to pay for extra - I would phrase it in the terms that you're aware with all the damp weather that it has been very difficult to keep the house dry and warm, and you're worried about mould appearing because the house feels so cold even when the heating is on high and say you've looked in the loft and it looks like more insulation could easily work. If he's reluctant to send someone in to do it, if the loft seems accessible you could offer to do it, and worst case scenario he says no you could just insulate it yourselves, but it'd be ££ well spent and you then could take it with you when you go.

Another huge heat loss area is doors and windows. Get or make sausages to block any gaps under doors. Buy thermally insulated curtains (new or secondhand, personally I find Dunelm good on price) for all the windows.

For electricity, go round and look for things left on standby, I'm always guilty of leaving the (spare) big printer on standby, and if it decides it needs ink it lights the screen up brightly but as that faces the wrong way I only see this if I open the spare room at night! Turn off anything not needed or after use - microwave, chargers, etc. Look at how you use your cooker - can you part or full microwave as it's cheaper? Can you cook two things at once or double measures and microwave heat when you need it?

@Ariela Will definitely check for stuff on standby! Probably the culprit for the electricity as I think we are in habits from when electricity wasn’t an arm and a leg and it didn’t matter as much, like leaving lamps on in lounge etc.

Will look into insulation too, definitely not something landlord would want to pay for (he won’t even pay for an extractor fan in the bathroom to deal with our mould problem on the ceiling in there) so may be worth investing ourselves!

DD for our 3 bed is £176 pcm.

@GasPanic Managed to get home earlier today and photo the gas meter in relative daylight. I didn't want to push the buttons and am prepared to be embarrassed but...is it even on? It does have the m3 on it I see, so I assume that is all correct with the m3 on my bills? Sorry if I am being dense, I just don't want to sound like a lunatic asking someone out for a gas leak if there's an issue with my meter instead!

Press button A for the Gas reading

I re-read it when I posted and thought what an idiot I sounded - it's been drilled into me red buttons are bad!

I know @makeupme , I have the same meter and keep expecting the house to explode when I press it for a reading.
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Looks modern so is almost certainly in m3.

Provided your bill shows you are paying in m3 then it should be fine.

Always worth checking the actual meter reading against the bills though, because sometimes the smart meters are not so smart.

No matter how much gas heating we use or not, our electricity always costs more. Can't work out what on though. LED lighting, LCD TV. phone charging and a 100w electric blanket for 30 minutes at night.

Electricity costs about 3x gas.

I think you might be confusing the price of one unit of each with how much it costs. Those aren't the same thing

Iirc it does cost more to do exactly the same thing with electricity than gas, say boil a kettle, but not three times as much and for most things they aren't interchangable so it's meaningless

Hi op,

Can I please ask how old your baby is?

I work in utilities and both energy and water bills usually increase with a new baby, though many people don’t realise it. I assume you’re needing to do extra washing, run the dishwasher more, give the baby a bath, have the tv on more etc. Are you sure your bills haven’t gone up simply because you’re using more?

I'm not. Electricity is much more expensive as energy than gas is. No one wants electric heating these days. Gas is considerably cheaper.

Depends whether the units of energy used are the same.

In gas you normally use m3 (volume used) whereas with electricity it is kWh (energy used). The m3 of gas (volume) needs to be coverted to kWh (energy) to make a direct comparison. In the case of m3 gas the conversion factor to kWh is about 11.

It's also worth remembering that gas is not 100% efficient. For a modern boiler 80% is probably a good efficiency (once things like the fact that the boiler may not be working in condensing mode because of the high flow temperature in the heating circuit) so you have to multiply the energy used at the boiler by about 0.8 to get a more accurate figure. Older boilers the figure might go down to 0.6 or less, and open gas fires might go down to 0.5 (50% of the heat in this case can end up going up the flue/chimney).

There is a final complication that in gas the energy does not necessarily go where you want it to, but does mostly go into your house. So for example there are losses in the heating circuit. These become a lot more significant as a fraction of the energy used if you are trying to heat only a small number of rooms by turning off radiators.

Still, when you factor in all of these things as a pp suggests, the TLDR is gas is still quite a bit cheaper than electricity, especially when applied to central heating.

That makes sense- you were in debt to Scottish Power and you are now in the heaviest months of use. So you have been underpaying Scottish Power

We swapped from Scottish Power to Octopus in December. Got almost £1000 back from Scottish Power and are currently paying Octopus based on what we use- meter readings and it is about £150 a month less than we were paying (which also makes sense as we were in credit so had been overpaying)

I recommend putting a curtain pole above your front & back doors & hang a heavy, long curtain. It helps to stop draughts.

They only ways to properly reduce your bills are to take a long hard look at how your house is insulated, loft, walls, doors, windows, under floor. Then you need to look at what your appliances are using. Is your heating system working efficiently? A tumble dryer is very expensive, anything with a heating element in it to be honest. A Smart Meter will help you understand which appliances are draining your income. Plus Octopus are now offering free electricity at certain times, so these are well worth using. It will be harder with a young baby, or an elderly person in the home, as they need slightly different energy resources.
21c is excessive, simply putting on a jumper or extra layer could reduce this. Can you isolate different radiators around the home, and not heat empty rooms continuously?
We took a long hard look at our very old house, mid Victorian semi, and made a few changes that reaped instant savings. Start with small things, build this up as you can to better insulate your home, slightly change your habits. Good luck.

Sounds as if you're in Scotland and it's disgraceful that we pay the highest unit rates in the UK and have some of the coldest weather. Scottish Government has enabled businesses to create huge amounts of renewable energy but cannot own the power or the power companies. Scotland now has massive amounts of power to export but gets nothing at all for it. David Cameron made sure that the planning system did not allow many turbines to be built in England so massive pylons and cables are being put in to take electricity south. The owner of Octopus has said that Scotland should have a lot of free or cheap electricity. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj509yg9n3qo