Energy prices, what's your plan?

December we used £254 gas. I feel your pain.

This is a graph representation of increasing cost from the Glow in-house display.

 

Well we have just signed up for a solar installation on our roof of 6KW. Payback time is calculated at just under 8 years, however this is with the French electricity prices which are far more reasonable than the UK.

 

January utility usage in, first month on the new rates (came out of fixed tariff mid December)

£1028

 

BP and Shell posting record profits. BP are even saying it will scale back plans to reduce fossil fuel extraction.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64544110

Here's 2 very good and simple fixes to the electricity prices:

Source:

 

If I can think of an obvious similar scenario the only thing stopping it are vested interests and political will.

We're being taken for a massive ride.

 

Bought an old mac mini that I whacked an ssd and 16gb ram in and use that primarily at my desk with my aoc 27" 1080p monitor - uses 1p an hour on the smart meter Then started replacing all my consoles for low power versions... Have a ps3 slim with an ssd in that now uses 100w/per hour vs 200w of my phat, about to buy a ps4 slim and put an ssd in that which uses 74w/per hour vs 150-160w of a phat, and going to build a low power usage 3600x/rx6600 that's framecapped to 60fps/undervolted.
The ps3 slim uses 3p an hour with a 27" aoc monitor/beefy speakers/amp at a nice enough volume, the ps4 slim should use around 2p with the same setup, oh and I have a modded wii for gamecube gaming and that was something hilarious like 1p an hour again with the moni and speakers My 65" HiSense 4k tv only uses 3p an hour on max brightness playing 4k hdr 60fps

 

Had a council circular through the door recently re: signing up for solar as a community group or some such. Is this still worth doing these days, or is the general cost prohibitive vs benefits?

 

It's an upfront investment but should pay off, depending on your roof size and orientation. I have had solar since 2015, it can only save when the sun is shining and you actively maximise your usage during that time. It gets tiresome doing things manually.

I think ability to store energy, eg. home battery storage. will pay off quicker. Currently cheapest you can get is 12p/kWh Octopus Go off-peak and 44p/kWh other times. That's a difference of 33p/kWh if shift all your day time electricity to this cheap period. So if it takes £5k to install a home battery, it'll only need 15,151 kWh of time-shifted electricity, about 5 years to payback for a slightly tech focused household (9-10 kWh per day).

Combine the 2 and you'd be laughing.

 

Meanwhile in China where I live, only paid less than 300 GBP for the whole year including gas. Family of 5 using as much as we want whenever we want. The UK is in a managed decline imo, sad.

 

TBH I think I may have panicked a little, helped on by the f-ing media. I doubled my Eon payments, and now even though I am at £1300 in credit they won't let me reduce them ffs.

I don't think it was just me either. Mum now has £1700 in credit, and I was speaking to tree the other day and he said his was far less than he thought it would be too. Not like the media likes to scare any one of course /roll eyes. I might have to phone Eon tbh. I really don't want to keep piling up money for them to make interest on.

 

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/c.../claim-back-credit-from-your-energy-supplier/

 

Thanks. They won't give me back a big chunk of it, 'cause it was when the govt were giving me £60 a month. I usually put £50 in. Mostly because I am only here half of the time. Before I knew about the £60 I doubled it to £100, and then of course I was paying over three times as much in total. Problem is when I went to reduce it the other day it would only let me increase it. Which is annoying. I don't want anything back out of there (I am happy to have lots of credit, tis good for the anxiety that) but yeah at the same time I don't need to keep paying £100. I will phone them tomorrow.

 

Yeah, there's something strange going on. Government figures doesn't add up to my real world use, it's not as expensive as it had been made out.

Currently £11 in credit. Over last 9 months with Octopus, mid June to mid March, I've paid a bit less than £1500. There's no chance I'm going to get close to £2000 come 1 year mark, now that winter is almost over.

We run 2 EV's, house idle at over 250w due to smart stuff. (although do have a small solar PV) House kept at comfortable 19c with smart thermostat whenever we are home.


I can highly recommend Octopus. I can set any monthly payment amount I prefer. Due to some problem with my smart meter, I didn't get billing for 3 months until they got all the backdated readings. Comms were great and the problem were sorted in a timely manner.