If you have a large 5 bedroom house, what is your electricity spend per month?

[hmcReborn]

Assuming that you have a boiler and gas central heating and hot water.

I am almost too embarrassed to declare ours. I never normally monitor bills , and confess I haven't really noticed before, but I just had to take the recent bill out of the filing cabinet and photocopy it for proof of ID, and noticed that it was (oh God, here goes) £160 for the month. Is this normal ?!?!

We are a bit lax with leaving lights on and tv on - will change my habits for my pocket and the planet, but we're not that lax

It must make an awful lot of difference though as to who is at home and for how long during the week?

My DH and I both work from home and are DC's are at private school so they are off for 4 months a year - it must make an enormous difference to things like lights, computers even stuff like how often the dishwasher gets put on as you are all using more plates, mugs etc. I cook from scratch so use tons of utensils.

The trick of a new supplier tempting you in with a lower monthly payment is quite common. After a few months they put it up again, because it was only an estimate, even though the price has not changed.

You need to know the tariff, including standing charge, and calculate the annual cost using your actual meter readings. If the tariff is 1% or 2% lower, then your payments might go down by 1% or 2%. It is very unlikely to be 50% less.

The regular payments are based on estimates of your usage, which may be inaccurate, varied by past underpayments or overpayments.

Our bills went up a lot when DS1 got obsessed with online gaming on a PC, the fan in the PC uses lots of power. DS1 gets no pocket money until he cuts down his usage further

Qforcucumber thank you, which code of bulbs should I be looking out for instead?

LED GU10

They are getting cheaper, but you need a lot of them because little spots are not a good way of lighting a room.

Spots and downlighters are things that fashionable whizzo interior designers like because they are so unsuitable for their purpose that they are novel and distinctive.

£420 a month? I feel quite faint.

Have you got half the street growing plants in your attic?

about 2400kwh here per year; 3 bed detached, two people home most of the time. Cooking from gas, heating and hot water from oil. Electric currently £27 a month.

no dryer, dishwasher every other day (You don't need a clean mug every time, and yes I cook from scratch too although I do it in bulk). Washing machine 5-6 times a week. Electric oven doesn't get used much. Low energy bulbs. Lots of tea made but kettle only filled as much as needed. One TV, a couple of laptops, no silly spotlights.

if you have halogens (even 'eco-halogens' which is greenwash) you probably don't need to put the heating on! Lose them, we are short on electricity as it is.

Thank you pigletjohn when they're a bit cheaper I'll buy lots. The wattage doesn't seem like it'll be that bad all added together. I mean obviously better to have normal lights but we only just moved in.

Ours is £90 per month - large 6 bed house.

It went down hugely when we changed from a power to OVO. Npower wanted to charge us £420/month!

Someone at home all day long so kettle used a lot. Electricity for cooking in summer (oil Aga in winter), tumble dryer once a day in winter, dishwasher twice a day.

Crikey. We are on lowest tariff here for gas and electric but our gas is £120pm and electric is £60.
Someone is always home though and it's a draughty house.

Aldi & Lidl regularly have LED bulbs now at £4-5 each - I'm pretty sure they have the GU10s, but probably only in 3w, which may not be enough for a kitchen (it's not enough for a bedside lamp, I ended up paying £6 for a 5w one from Tesco)

We used to have the other kind of little down lighters (push-in, not twist) - we had 6 x 50w in the kitchen & 3 x 50w in the bathroom so they used a horrible amount of power (probably more than all the low-energy bulbs in the rest of the house combined)

We now have 9 x 5w LEDs in kitchen, 5 x 5w in bathroom. They are a much more natural light than any of the ordinary low-energy bulbs, I do hope they'll be available in 100/150w equivalents at some point.

Aldi last had them in on 8th Oct - worth looking out for. Looks like they have both GU10 & the other kind. (I can't get a better image unfortunately. Once the date's passed you can't get the detailed page)

Also I've recently discovered that the cheap LED bulbs with SES fitting make excellent hob lights (inside the extractor) - much better than the proper kind which used to blow all the time, & slimmer than the ordinary low-energy ones)

How about this one though - jazz up the kitchen a bit www.amazon.co.uk/GU10-Multi-Color-Light-Remote-Control/dp/B00ENFAHM4/ref=sr_1_9?s=lighting&ie=UTF8&qid=1445539421&sr=1-9

Some of the gu10 LEDs im finding are still 5w though so no better than halogens?

Omg halogens are 50 not 5? I need to burn down the kitchen.

They're not all 50 - there are 20s & 30s I think. But mine were 50!

Oooh, look at these though! (Further down the page from your colour one)

5 x 6w for £11.99!!! £2.40 each. Bargain!

www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00WR10WGM?psc=1

I got mine off ledhut.co.uk, I got cashback on them from topcashback too. So that was another 20%.

£270 per month for gas and electricity.

Those ones are 9.99 now! I ordered 10 yesterday so I can make sure they look OK in the fittings. We need 40!

Spots and downlighters

Sorry pigletjohn

Get yourself a clip-on electricity monitor (your library might lend them).

Wait till everyone is out of the house and turn off EVERYTHING. If you're still using power, there's something like an old immersion heater switched on somewhere or your neighbour's stealing your leccy for their cannabis farm.

You'll also be able to see how much you're using when everyone's back in the house and identify energy guzzling appliances.

Just a tip - use the timer on your heating. Our heating is off completely during the day between 8am and 5pm whilst we're out at work/school and is only on during the hours that we're in the house. We also set it to manual during the summer months so it's off permanently, we only turn it on when we need to.

Oh and also, don't leave laptop or phone chargers plugged in & switched on. They still drink electric even with nothing connected to them. And turn the TV off at the wall, not just on stand by.

My power suppliers fitted two new fancy meters with a separate consumption display thing and I've been taken aback by how much power electric lights use compared to the other devices which I always thought were the real power-hungry ones. I was always given to turning lights off when not absolutely needed but now I'm really quite obsessive about it.