Help! Why are our energy bills SO high?

[WibbleVonBibble]

I know that energy bills have been going up for everyone, but from talking to friends I really feel that our bills are crazy high - and I’d love some advice about how to work out why.

Last year we used 11,700 kWh. This year we’re already at 3,500 kWh. Last month’s bill was £612. This is just electricity, we have a heat pump, no boiler.

We live in a 3 bedroom semi detached house. We have an electric car, but it only gets charged during the cheaper rate times (we’re on a heat pump optimised tariff).

Neither my husband nor I work from home.

This is a baffling amount to spend on energy, right?

I’m wondering if there’s some problem with wiring somewhere in the house that is causing huge amounts of power to get used for some mystery reason…

What can we do? Would an electrician be able to work out what’s going on? Is there a device or technique we can use to investigate?

thank you in advance for any advice

We're with Octopus. A few questions to narrow it down:

1. Are you in credit or debit with Octopus? It's possible that your DD is just set too high and you're accumulating credit. We ended up £2400 in credit with our old supplier.

1. Have you got an Octopus Home Mini? That can show you minute by minute consumption so it will help you see if you have any extra usage.

1. Are you sure you don't have any appliances running that you've forgotten about? Our usage was high and I couldn't work it out until DH said that he'd put an oil filled radiator on 'low' in our old, detached, slightly leaky garage to keep it dry. Of course, it was on 'low' but on all the time! It added about 20 kWh per day to our bill.

1. What does your statement show? You should have a bill that looks a bit like below - it shows the high and low rate charging and how much for each half-hour.

I have the same problem, OP, only worse and our bills are around £1k a month during winter (1 x electric car too) . I have been on numerous heat pump forums and it appears we are far from alone with this issue. Worse thing I ever did

My son had a fault on his immersion heater which meant that it was turned on to boost the whole time, almost like having a kettle permanently on to boil. Could it be something like that?

How much were the bills before the heat pump installation? It has to be connected to that - I’d ask whoever installed it to come round and have a conversation with them. Something sounds very wrong.

It's not lights or appliances or cooking, it will be going on heating the house or water. Powerful showers can use a vast amount if they are not quick. You can try turning your immersion heater off and on, there is a faint chance you have a hot water leak. A modern cylinder is well insulated and only uses electricity when cold water is being heated, after which it will stay hot, literally for days if it is not used up. A faulty heater that does not turn off can boil the water, which you would notice (it is also very dangerous).

Because each 1kWh of electrical energy turns into 1kWh of heat energy, wherever it is going will be warm or hot. The only appliance that uses a lot of power for a long time is a tumble drier. Even a hob or oven turns itself down as soon as the thermostat detects it is up to temperature. Washing machines and dishwashers have heating cycles that last about ten minutes.

Apart from multiple halogen downlighters, modern LED lighting is trivial cost. Phone chargers are so low they are almost undetectable.

Walk round with your smart meter, turning things off and see what happens.

You haven't got electric underfloor heating, have you?

P.s.

I commend you for quoting kWh used, not pounds paid. The money is not a good indicator because for most people, it includes estimates (sometimes inaccurate) for the entire year divided by 12, and previous under- or over-payments.

No help to you, but it's worth knowing that energy from electricity costs about four times as much as energy from gas.

11,700 kWh pa doesn’t sound crazily high to me but it depends how much of that is going into the car. I use around 10-11k kWh per year, also with a heat pump and EV. Over winter I’ve been using about 50 kWh per day, a lot of which is due to the heat pump. I have batteries and an EV tariff so despite my high usage the cost is low eg £150 for January for all household electrics, heating, hot water and transport.
Are you using the tariff to your advantage, ramping up the heating in the cheaper hours and reducing it during the 4-7 pm peak?

Your oven is a very high user of energy. Why do you have it on every day. When I use the oven it is full: Meat, potatoes, pudding, all the veg including ones in water, plus a cake if needed, all at once. We use a smallish kettle and only put in the amount of water needed. All water in immersion tank heated only once a day to 60 degrees and it lasts us all day including a shower each (not pumped). If you have pumped showers they use a lot more water. We have gas CH and use all electric for cooking.

We are 2 pensioners in a 4 bedroom detached 1998 house, heating on as necessary, sometimes 22 degrees. Our bills have not been over £200 per month this winter and are normally in winter £160 to £180 per month.

Forgot to say we do not have an electric car. I do know that if you are on a cheap overnight tariff then the electric price is higher during the day.

It's hard to say whether you are using more than last year as the bill will be loaded towards winter so you would expect a lot more to be used in Jan/Feb.

3500 kwh in 50 days suggests 70 kwh per day which is huge. Lets say 15 kwh of that would be for non heating uses (which should be plenty unless you are car charging significantly). That leaves 55kwh for heating.

Bear in mind heat pumps have a multiplier effect which increases the energy output over the input. This means the 55 kwh even with a relatively poor COP (eg the multiplier is 2) should be around 110kwh per day of energy that you are actually putting into heating the house (and if the pump is anything like good then you should be getting a multiplier of 3).

That is a lot of energy to heat a 3 bed semi. So unless you have zero insulation on the walls and in the loft and keep the windows open all day something is probably going wrong somewhere and the heat pump is the most likely explanation.

I don't quite understand the concept of a "heat pump optimised" tariff. Tariffs are generally set up so that you get different prices for electricity at different times. A lot of special tariffs give cheap electricity when the demand is low, for example a car charger tariff might give lower prices at night to charge the car, but higher during the day. Heat pumps generally are on all the time, so its not clear to me how a "heat pump optimised" tariff would work over a normal tariff which just gives the same price per unit all the time.

I think you need to get a heat pump expert in to look at your system and see what the issues are. An electrician will be able to tell you where the electricity is being used, but not best qualified to optimise or investigate the perfomance of the pump.

It's probably worth adding that car charging can add on considerable amounts if you are doing a lot of miles per day. My car does about 35 miles for 13 kwh, so if you were doing say 100 miles per day of car charging that could eat some electric up (for me it would be about 40 kwh).

My car charges over night and costs around 3 or 4 quid, it takes energy from the grid when it’s cheapest so stops and starts through the night

I think it has to be the heat pump. We only have electricity in our house (4 bed end of terrace, 5 occupants) and we have electric heaters which when we had the EPC done last month, the guy told us how inefficient it was and we should have done electric storage heaters, bla bla, we use the oven almost daily, wash everyday but have a dehumidifier on all through winter which also dries the clothes, electric showers and DD spends ages in the shower, both wfh 3 days a week etc and our bill is £230 a month. That’s all year round as we use less in summer and more in winter but overall, evens out at £230 a month. We’re trying to sell at the moment and many of the house viewers have been put off because we only have electricity even though we only spend £230 a month which they all seem to think is a lot. We’re with Octopus as well.
Now hearing what you’re spending, I believe yours is extremely expensive and you should investigate the heat pump. something is not right.