How much electricity?

[Lalaliamia]

My smart meter is telling me that we’re using around £12 worth of electricity a day, so £360 per month!!! This is a massive jump & I can’t work it out. We’re supposed to be on Octopus’ best tariff. Can I ask what your electricity spend looks like? There’s 3 of us at home & we’re mostly out all day.

How is your house and water heated?

If you have a smart meter then the Octopus app will show you exactly when the energy is being used.

We use about £5 a day, but we are gas heating and cooking.

That does seem a lot, I don't hit even close to that amount despite electric shower, tumble dryer, hot tub, Christmas lights and working from home

What has changed? Is it that you've put the heating on? For £12 electricity, if you're paying 26.48p/KW, you're using 45KWh per day.

Gas central heating and cooking. According to the Octopus app we've jumped from using £2 a day to £12. Nothing whatsoever has changed so I can't figure it out.

That's a lot! We use around £3 a day in winter, everything electric except for oil CH. Only two of us. Eon Next.

Last month we spent on average £3.40 a day, that includes standing charge. 4 of us, I WFH and we are usually all in separate rooms on different TVs/consoles. We also dry all our clothes with a dryer, so yes I’d say there’s definitely something going on with your meter! We are with British Gas.

We are 2 in the week and 4/5 at the weekend. I wfh in a 3 bed. We spend £3/4 a day mon - Thurs and about £5ish Fri - sun (more cooking, laundry, gaming etc).

That drops to about £2.50 in the week and £3.50
at the weekend in the summer.

I pay £120pm so I’m over paying on purpose. I am a bit of a heating tyrant and won’t normally have it on more than 2 hours a day, 3 if it’s needed but also the house generally doesn’t drop below about 17° anyway unless we’re away.

Edited to say that we are gas central heating and hob but electric oven.

Either something has developed a fault or an appliance has been left switched on.

I'd suggest going round your house room by room and ensure everything is off.

Then restart essential stuff room by room while somebody else watches the meter to see what, if anything, causes a surge.

Check your tariff. We were initially put on the wrong ( more expensive ) tariff when we joined Octopus recently and had to get in touch and explain the situation to them.

Given you’re on gas for cooking and heating something is consuming electricity.
Do you have a smart meter or live costs via Octopus app?

What does your actual app or the Octopus website show for usage? It will show you half hourly breakdowns of when the energy is being used.

The smart meter display unit (the smart meter is the meter in your cupboard, not the little screen that sits on the side) isn’t always reliable on cost as sometimes the tariff info isn’t updated correctly. Change it to kWh view and see what that says.

I bought these which monitor the energy usage of whatever you have plugged in through them. Yes, you would need to buy them but at £14 they may be worth the investment to get to the bottom of the problem.
https://amzn.eu/d/hoJ2aKF

This is what you need to look at. £2 a day is a perfectly reasonable amount in a home where heating and cooking is on gas. It's obvious that a sudden jump to £12 a day means that something drastic has changed so comparing with others won't tell you anything, you need to find out if your meter has gone faulty or something that uses a lot of power has been switched on, like an old immersion heater or electric heater.

If you've cost an immersion heater or electric heater, just check they're not on constant.

If you're allnoyr all day, take a Meyer reading on leaving and return, have a few.units been used? If so, try a process of elimination by switching certain things off for a while. If that doesn't help, wondering if you've got a faulty meter.

I was wondering about an electric heater.

Ours spiked a few years ago, culprit was an oil filled radiator under my desk that was left on long after it'd done its job of taking the chill off.

Immersion heater is one I'd not thought of but if it's a wall switch in an airing cupboard then it getting knocked into the on position is a possibility.

Our display is set to show how many watts are being used, can you set yours to this, our background like when we are in bed is 50-200 watts, when the kettle goes on it goes to 3kws. Then you can see how many watts is being used, we use about 200 to 400 doing general stuff like watching telly, lights etc, with no big appliances on.

Wow! That doesn’t sound right considering you have gas heating!

We use an immersion to heat our water so know ours will be high, but we’re only using £6-8 per day- and that’s with 2 adults who shower daily and a teen who is never out of the bloody thing!

Do the investigations as PPs have said. Also consider whether it might be that smart meter that's gone awry. Ours has never been right and our supplier doesn't care - they say their only obligation is to make sure we have one!

Our immersion heater uses a lot of electricity. Once it stopped working and was heating the water
24/7, consumption jumped up. (We did have unlimited hot water though which was nice. 😁)

There are 5 of us here, home most of the time (wfh) and we average about £7.50 a day. That’s with multiple laptops and pcs going. It will be more if the washing machine and tumble drier gets used during the day.

it does sound like something has been left on - immersion heater?

5 of us here and with the tumble dryer, washing machine (on eco mode), at least one of us WFH and dishwasher on at least once a day we average just under £4. Gas heating and cooking.

I would query it, doesn't sound right at all.

We are with octopus, fixed at the beginning of this year. We are 2 adults and 2 children in a 5 bed detached and i'm at home all day with a baby.
Through the summer we looking at ~£80 electricity and £20 gas a month. November was £100 electricity and £100 gas. We are using the dishwasher, oven, washing machine and tumble drier regularly throughout the week. We average £3 a day with daily costs £2 - £5 for gas and electricity.

Switch your meter display to kWh setting and go around turning things on and off to see what is causing the meter usage to jump up.