Pilot light gas consumption

Ours shows some strange readings in the morning, I put it down to its adding the standing charge to the used gas.

But really, pilot lights? They went from most appliances 20 years ago.

Sounds about right. Before the price hikes in the past couple of years, I used to think of the cost of running my dinosaur boiler as 50p/day for a tank of stored hot water, pilot light and standing charge.

Sounds like the standing charge, mine is 30p/day? Didn't you flip to Gas consumption to see how many Kw/h you have used.

Do they go off before midnight. Is it staying on for an extra hour because of summer time?

I think what you are seeing is the standing charge, but I would expect it to be higher than that. Check the display in Kwh or Therms... .. if it is pilot light the only way to reduce is a new boiler which won't have one.

Dave

Sources on the internet suggest that pilot lights use about 4kWh a day. On that basis, assuming 6p/kWh, you seem to be paying considerably more (NB standing charge and vat not included! If they are, it would bring the daily charge up to about 60p, but it would be unfair as most of the standing charge would be factored into the daily use of all gas used in the boiler, not just the pilot light (and anything else if you have a gas hob, for example).

I got caught some years ago when they changed my gas meter.

I used to use my immersion heater on E7 in the summer.

During this time no gas consumption was registered, until a new electronic meter was fitted. I then was using about 100 kWh per month on the pilot light alone, so I changed to shutting it down for the summer.

The old meter must have had so much leakage that it couldn't register very low flow.

Chris

Unless you fancy turning it off and relighting it every day, then being realistic, replace the boiler with something modern!

(chances are it is costing you significantly more than the cost of the pilot light in lower efficiency anyway)

After other suggestions that I replace the boiler with a more modern one I did some investigating. I thought the boiler was relatively modern, a Worcester-Bosch, Greenstar condensing boiler, installed about 8-9 years ago.

It doesn't in fact have a pilot light! My old fashioned thinking assumed that all boilers had a pilot light.

Since no gas can have been consumed during the 8 hour period the displayed cost must be the standing charge.- This will be checked tomorrow at 08:00 when I expect the Kwh for the period to be zero.

Thanks everyone for your input.

Malcolm

The IHD displays the daily standing charge which is currently around 28 to 30p. This is applied at around midnight (possibly with a 30+ minute delay).

My boiler has eaten 74 kWh this week, that's for a tank of H/W each day and the pilot light.

My 12kW oil boiler is on for about 10 minutes a day to keep the showers fed...

Ah, ok :-)

Pilot lights have not been commonly used for quite some time...

Some combi boilers do have a "tempering" facility where they keep a small amount of hot water pre-heated in the DHW heat exchanger to enable faster delivery of how water when a tap is turned on. However I doubt that would use as much gas as a pilot running all day.

Also possible that there is a gas leak...might be worth doing a pressure drop test on the installation to make sure.

I think a modern smart meter is actually better at picking up very small leaks than a pressure test. Not so handy for quick diagnosis but looking at daily half hourly consumption can reveal issues that would probably be too small to be picked up with a manometer.

The gas valve in my boiler started bypassing a tiny quantity of gas and showed up as the smallest possible “blip” every couple of hours on my consumption graph.

Yes, Kwh gas consumption was zero so no leaks either.

Malcolm