Electricity Bill is huge.. or is it?

[blu4]

Yikes,

that does seem a lot!

The average UK annual KWh is 3,200 which is around 8-9 KWh per day - you are getting through 23 KWh which is not far off what energy wasting Americans use!

You could get an Owl electric monitor Home | The OWL

which lets you see how much juice you are using - you can go round and turn things off until you find what is wasting so much.

Your meter could be faulty - the Owl is not exact but it will give you a close enough figure.

You can also get plug in energy monitors which will measure how much say your fridge is using each day.

Don't forget a 100 watt load left on all day will use 2.4 KWh per day - 3 or 4 idling devices like PC's TV's, sky box, router etc, etc could add up to that at least.

I binned a mains clock radio which was wasting 25 watts just to tell me the time (badly).

Yes, you may well have some vampire appliance sucking far too much power - some older crappy TV's or fridges waste an awful lot of electricity, even supposedly on "standby"

However, heating anything with electricity is expensive, so it may be that is about right if you are doing that.

What are you using for water heating, cooking and space heating because those will easily use that amount of electricity? If you don't use gas, you're just transferring the cost of heating to electricity which is more. On the other no boiler, rads and cooker means no leaks, breakdowns, annual service and expensive replacement costs.

Do you know anyone with the same setup nearby to see what their costs are?

Good luck!

 

I've got the Owl yesterday and I have to say it is very nice and accurate. It opened up my eyes to how much just idle devices take on standby! The boiler was taking up 2.5kWh! I'll be definitely calling up my landlord about this. The Owl is a fantastic device- I don't get how people can hate it on so much bu

[Andrew_C]

Boiler? Or immersion heater?

 

2.5kW is about right, but it should have a thermostat on it so it only heats when it needs to. If properly insulated, that should only be when you have drawn water. As I wrote above, an immersion will have two elements, one for off-peak, and one for "top-up" duties.

[blu4]

Boiler? Or immersion heater?

 

2.5kW is about right, but it should have a thermostat on it so it only heats when it needs to. If properly insulated, that should only be when you have drawn water. As I wrote above, an immersion will have two elements, one for off-peak, and one for "top-up" duties.

 

Well, I have no idea. The person who put in the boiler/immersion heater put all the irrelevant information but not the model or the serial number so I have no idea what it is. I tried looking at the brand+capacity but no avail. My Landlord will know.

[pcstru]

I've got the Owl yesterday and I have to say it is very nice and accurate. It opened up my eyes to how much just idle devices take on standby! The boiler was taking up 2.5kWh! I'll be definitely calling up my landlord about this. The Owl is a fantastic device- I don't get how people can hate it on so much bu

Get hold of a manual for the boiler. Some have a setting that keeps a small amount of water hot (a sort of standby) which means when you turn the tap on you don't have to wait as long to get hot water. You can usually turn that off.

[blu4]

Get hold of a manual for the boiler. Some have a setting that keeps a small amount of water hot (a sort of standby) which means when you turn the tap on you don't have to wait as long to get hot water. You can usually turn that off.

 

I am afraid that is long gone but after doing some research it is a Gledhill brand 120 litre capacity. I could not find anything online in terms of manuals. It was fitted a decade ago.

[pcstru]

Looking at their current offerings a number of them feature heat stores which operate all the time. A constant draw of 2.5kW would seem odd but not if the heat store insulation is failing. I think you would be within your rights to ask your landlord to at least have it professionally serviced.