Electricity bill is disgusting - what can I do here!

[Coalasblack]

Prepay meter. Landlord will not give permission to remove and move to direct debit.

Yearly statement: £1298 on electricity alone

Heating oil was: £1100 on oil and the tank is already running low

House is empty 3 days a week when i'm at work.

Is my bill particularly high compared to others? 3 bed detached house. I do use the tumble dryer quite a bit, electric over, chest freezer and separate fridge. Other than that i can't think what on earth its all going on

The good thing about being prepayment is you can use it like a smart meter and work out how much things cost if they’re on or off. For example, I know a load in my tumble drier costs about 50p - so it’s unlikely to be just that makes up the bill. It’s about £10 a month extra for me to run the tumble drier for every load, which is quite rare and reserved for the worst weather.

Please invest in a dehumidifier. Our ebac costs 2p per day to run and is way cheaper on electricity than a tumble drier. It will massively improve your damp and mould problem too. Have you spoken to the electricity company to see if anything different can be done or what help they can give you?

Sounds very high. We have a four bed detached house, single glazing, poorly insulated, £45 a month for prepay electricity, oil looks likely to be about £400 for the year plus about £150 in coal. We are pretty frugal with heating but tumble dry the laundry.

In the previous well insulated three bed semi electricity was £40 a month, and £300 of oil did two years.

That's a huge amount and more than we pay on combined gas and electric for a year, quite a lot more.
We use the tumble dryer a lot but we have an A++ one so quite efficient and I'm home all day.

Heating is set to come on to 18 degrees between 6.30am - 8.30 am and then 3pm - 9pm.

I think that's quite alot is the property not insulated?

The house literally leaks heat and cold air. I can hear the windows rattling in their frames as I type!

I've spent about £30 this month on seals and brushes for the doors and windows but the house is hopelessly inefficient. It got an E on the EPC certificate thing. Boiler is only 2 years old. Before that there was no heating except a rayburn and electric heaters.

Do you have lots of those recessed halogen lightbulbs? If so they can be 50 watts each and quite common for each room to have several of them. I changed mine to LED and they now use 3 watts each (weeps at the thought of all the electricity waster previously). You can usually get like for like lightbulbs.

I honestly don't think changing to a billing meter will make much difference. You use alot of electric and the house is inefficient.

You will still use alot of units. Pre payment being automatically more expensive isn't true anymore.

I'm not pre pay meter and pay £80 a month for electricity and gas, we use a dryer for about 8-10 hours a week. A dryer it's a justification for what you're paying!