Need to reduce my gas bill

[Mike Hibbert]

Hello Folks,

I really need to reduce my gas bill, over Christmas I sat down and worked out that we are spending nearly £10 per day on Gas.

We are not living in tropical style heat, the day breaks down as follows...

(We have a CM67 Optimum Start Thermostat programmed as follows)

6:30 Set to be 17.5 degrees 7:30 Set to be 14 degrees 5pm Set to be 18.5 degrees 10pm Set to be 14 degrees

We both Shower daily and cook on gas, but neither of those are really issues.

The cost Breaks down as follows (measured over the last 24hours)

6:30pm - 9:30pm - £2

9:30pm - 6:30am - £2.50 (bearin in mind the optimum start will make the heating come on earlier that 6)

6:30am - 7:30am (showers) -90p

7:70am - 6:30pm - £4.50

So my question is how can we save. We are looing at upgrading the loft insulation, we have double glazing and a regularly serviced Highflow 400 boiler.

All the rooms have TRVs (except the bathroom), the thermostat is in the lounge (with wide open TRVs).

Am I better off running the heating at 17.5 degrees all the time and closing off some of the TRVs a bit upstair where we dont want it as warm? Do I increase the heat output on the boiler?

any advice will be appreciated as we can't afford to go on like this, it's not even that warm most of the time!

cheers Mike

[MikeS]

Do you have a leak?. I have a 1960's 5 bed house and mine isn't that much there's four of us and we have rads on constantly set at 17 during day and

21 at night.

[Andy Cap]

What are you paying for your gas ?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Gosh, is that annually? or just over the winter?

That's about my TOTAL annual energy bill for 4000 sq ft house..

If its just for winter, at around 2.5p/Kwh, that is 400 Kwh in 24 hours..or 16Kw average.

My whole house is calculated to need 10Kw to stay warm at -5c external..

But its well insulated.

Unless your property is super large, this implies dreadful insulation.

The usual remedies apply. Massive loft insulation (because its cheap and easy) draughtproof every crack with foam strips, or caulk (because its cheap, though not that easy) then do the walls with cavity fill or dry lining (because its the last major heatloss). Next think floors, especially if suspended wooden, and then if you have any budget left, look at the minor details like TRV's boiler and DG windows. And double lined curtains. HUGE difference with SG, less with DG.

[Andy Cap]

Further to that, does your meter read 100s cubic feet or cubic metres. It should say on the front.

[John Rumm]

That sounds a bit excessive I would agree.

The obvious one would be to check they not charging you on the wrong basis. Having a meter that reads m^3 can be one cause of billing cockup if they are assuming it reads 100s of Cu Ft and hence multiply by a factor to convert it to m^3

[fictitious]

£10 a DAY...FFS ....I got my last bill for £215 for 3 months . It's a 2 bed flat on a second floor with SG windows .I'm in all day and I do like things warm especially recently when it's been freezin' up here .I thought that was bad for 90 days ( £2.39 a day) but a tenner a day ..You sure it's as much as that? How much are your actual bills over the piece?

[Dave Liquorice]

I believe gas is a little more tha 2.5p/kWhr these days, more like

4.5p/kWhr, thats still 22kwhr/day though. We use more (approx 25kWhr) than that in oil during the winter but we have the place a little warmer all day (18.5C) and up to 20C in the evening, there is also a stat set to 10C in the other half of the building that is more or less equal size as well.

As others have said check the bill for correct units between what your meter measures and what they use for calculations. Failing that insulation and draft proofing. Replacing our old draft secondary glazed windows with modern DG ones made a noticeable reduction in the oil consumption. They where very drafty though, curtain waving drafty even with the secondary glazing...

[meow2222]

Landlord's gas safety check would tell you if you have a gas leak anywhere, and if the flame in the boiler is ok. Wrong gas air mix would yield less heat per gas, as well as being a safety problem. That's where I'd begin.

If those arent the problem, you've got a huge uninsulated property, or perhaps half the back of the house has fallen off.

NT

[Colin Wilson]

Jeez, we got ours in today and they reckon we owe them =A3225 over the=20 last quarter (that's on top of the =A3135 paid by direct debit) - just=20 over 3 months worth, from 2nd October to 23rd December.

It's way out of kilter with previous bills, given that we had a refund=20 of about =A3200 (covering overpayment for the whole year) around about=20 April last year !

It also came as a shock to find out their "meter reader" managed to=20 imagine a reading out of thin air (over the odds, but not by much) as=20 we were both in work on the day he is alleged to have called.

Note: this is with the heating switched on *permanently* since about=20 September when it started to get cold, we don't have stats, it just=20 circulates and uses thermostatic rad valves to regulate the heat.

It doesn't help that in ours we have a single paned cheap thin wood=20 panelled back door, with a dirty great big XXL dog flap in it...

[ransley]

If its a condensing boiler than lower than 140f is the highest efficency of the units, actualy only heat the water to where it heats the home. Set your water heater low so only a hot water shower is used. You really need an energy audit , blower door test, and thermal photo to know what to do. You would be suprised at the HW that is wasted washing, your summer bill is the comparison. If you dont use a room closing it off will help a bit but I think you have many issues to look into. A boiler should not short cycle, longer cycles are more efficent and most thermostats have adjustments. If flame is blue and its been cleaned fully then it is running probably correctly. Heat rises, the attic is the cheapest to insulate and it will have the greatest payback for you. I dont know you temp lows but here in the US up to R 100 is needed.

is a US site with ideas and links but im sure you have better ones with maybe even better ideas.

[TheScullster]

"Mike Hibbert" wrote

.............snip

When I had our system upgraded 2 years ago, I specified separate upstairs and downstairs zones. Heating comes on at 3:00 in the afternoon downstairs (for kids return from school) and around 7:00 in the evening upstairs. Not sure what the payback time is on the upstairs/downstairs zoning, but it felt like the right thing to do while the boiler was being replaced.

I have 2 CM67s, to allow control of upstairs and downstairs separately. The stats were originally configured to use the optimum start option, but I found that they simply didn't "learn" when to start the system. Heating was kicking in maybe 2 hours ahead of the required start time. So I disabled this feature on both and just set the heating to come on sufficiently early to warm the place.

HTH

Phil

[Mathew Newton]

I've heard several similar reports from owners of the CM67.

We've got the CM67 replacement - CM927 - and found it be really quite good in this regard so perhaps they've improved the learning functionality?

Mathew

[Mike Hibbert]

I'm fairly confident that we don't have a leak, never smelled gas and the meter isn't always trickling, it only seems to move when the gas is being used.

[Mike Hibbert]

We pay 3.64p per kWh. The meter read in 100s Cubic feet, and I applied a conversion factor as follows...

=((((units*2.83)*39.2)*1.02264)/3.6)

where 2.83 is the multiplier from imperial to metric, 39.2 is rh calorific value, 1.02264 is a vulime correction (no idea what that is for!).

It looks to tally up with the meter and the bill, so I think that we are being billed correctly.

Does that seem right?

[Mike Hibbert]

That's only over the last week or so, we are averaging 267 KwH at 3.64p per KwH, so that's an average of £9.72.

The house is fairly large, it's a converted bungalow, so a lot of roofspace that we live in, but the eaves are not well insulated. We have checked them out and they are only insulated with 100mm, so will be adding 200mm next week. I hope this will make a significant improvement.

cheers Mike

[Mike Hibbert]

That's only over the last week or so, we are averaging 267 KwH at 3.64p per KwH, so that's an average of £9.72.

The house is fairly large, it's a converted bungalow, so a lot of roofspace that we live in, but the eaves are not well insulated. We have checked them out and they are only insulated with 100mm, so will be adding 200mm next week. I hope this will make a significant improvement.

cheers Mike

[Mike Hibbert]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that it's right. We paid £422 from July to December, but normally pay by DD so it's about £200 a month for Gas and Electricity.

>

[Mike Hibbert]

I'm going to be playing with the stat tonight to make sure it's not cycling to quickly, and I will be turning off the optimum start function so that I'm more in control. It was on at 5am this morning, at leat 90 mins before we needed it warm.

[Mike Hibbert]

I think this could be a major part of the problem (along with the crappy insulation!). The CM67 was on at least 90mins before it was needed this morning, just to get the house up to 17 degrees. I will disable this and see what happens.

I assume that turning up the heat output from the boiler will be more efficiend, and will reduce the cycling?