Hi,
I live in a rented flat with storage heaters and a hot water boiler powered by off peak electricity (Powergen said its the Economy 10 tariff).
My boiler has two immersion heaters with separate switches in the cupboard. They wern't marked so by trial and error I discovered that one works all the time and the other one only goes on at night when permanently switched "on".
So far so good....
Two days ago I woke up with no hot water, and after some experimentation I find that the storage heaters now also do not heat up (They've been off recently since its good weather..)
I can still heat up my hot water boiler using the other "always works" switch but only manually.
My questions are:
- How could only the night time cheap electricity stop working.
- How can my supplier (Powergen) fix it.
- If I use electrical appliances during the night time when it ought to be cheap electriicty will it still be cheap? e.g. if I turn on the water bolier "manually" at 2am in the morning??
I have inspected my meter (which is very confusing) which seems to have
3 rates, numbered 1-3, which when I phoned Powergen they told me 1 was night, 2 was day and 3 was "stored heat" (didn't really understand that bit). The meter still seems to change from day to night i.e. during day the rate 2 and 3 readings are flashed alternately and marked "current" and in the middle of the night rates 1 and 3 are marked "current".Sorry if this is a bit vague - I'm not really familiar with any of this stuff.
Any explanations or advice will be appreciated.