Energy prices, what's your plan?

Cheaper rates incoming / V's OVO, I'm going to sit tight / on the fence for now, at least until we see if OVO are buying out Shell's consumer base

 

Envy is not a virtuous quality. I sold lemonade and cut grass in my youth.

 

Got me beat, I was, thankfully also briefly, working at Toys R Us whilst at school

 

I remember that place once upon a time.

 

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2023/03/ovo-fixed-deal-after-months-with-no-deals/
Cheap for next few month. Not as cheap as projected price toward end of the year.

 

I’m thankful I’m still on a fixed rate tariff with Octopus until October.

 

Finally got smart meters installed on Friday and it looks like they're all properly sync'ed up and sending readings now.



The IHD that the engineer gave us only seems to be displaying gas usage, but I do plan to get one of the Glow CAD/IHDs so that I can start feeding data into Home Assistant via MQTT.

One thing I'm definitely going to do is move one of the energy monitoring smart plugs to my servers, I want to try and get a handle on what that constant background power draw is caused by. I'll probably move the one from my fridge, I've been monitoring that for 7 months and the pattern is pretty consistent - the compressor kicks in every 2-3 hours and pulls ~80W for roughly 2-3 hours.



I've been monitoring that since late September and it's used 213kWh in that time - just over £50 total on my current tariff, so it's about £7.20 per month.

 

Can highly recommend.
Basically get all the data smart meter usually displays, and (most importantly for my solar PV automations) instantaneous import/export power reading.

Monitoring fridge energy usage was what I wanted to do, but it needed moving the washing machine, I had been too lazy on that front.....

 

Can I get a sanity check.

Switched the gas heating off the other day but noticed that we still are routinely going through 30kwh of gas. The only use is the boiler for hot water.

We recently replaced the hot water tank with a highly insulated one with approx 1-2kwh of heat loss and an online calculator suggests heating 100l (most of a tank) from 10 c to 55 c is 5kwh. It's a condensing boiler with max 30kw capacity and the boiler temperature dial is about a 1/3 around from minimum so presumably running at less than 30kw. Either way I doubt its on for an hour a day for just hot water.

Has anyone got gas usage from recently with no heating and just hot water?

We have 2 adults showering a day with fairly high flow showers but it's surprising how much gas were using Vs say direct electric heating. Paranoid about a gas leak (no smells obviously) or a faulty meter which we had previously.

 

Going by my figures for June / July / August our household was using 100kWh of gas a month, for two adults showering and a bath for the kids every other day. So if you're doing 30kWh gas a month for two adults showering that sounds fair to me?

 

Not sure how much this helps you, since our situation is slightly different. 2 adults in our house and no kids. We have a storage heater instead of a combi boiler and we have an electric power shower - so literally the only time we have gas on is to heat up water for the storage tank to use for washing up, washing hands, etc.

This is our gas reading for Sunday, which is about a typical day for gas usage. Having the hot water on for that length of time is usually sufficient for our daily needs. About once a week or so the other half will have a bath instead of a shower, so on those days I usually have to put the hot water on for a couple of extra hours.



However the bad part of not having to use gas to heat water for the shower is the amount of electricity the shower uses. This is from yesterday when only I had a shower in the morning, instead of both of us.

 

About 24Kwh a month here for a little 4 bed but have electric showers mainly so don't really use a lot of hot water except for washing/dishwashing. Combi, no tank.

Missus may have had an hour or so of heating in that month though to take a cold edge off. Hard to tell all the detailed reporting from British gas has been borked since their updates to a new system.

 

This is what worries me, ours is running at 30kWh a DAY for just hot water.

As a another check I checked against this time last year (prior to shower and hot water tank upgrades) and it was closer to 15kwh per day

 

30kw a day ... too much, sounds like it must be always on.

 

According to my quick Googling the national average is 33kWh per day for gas usage, so 30 puts you slightly below average.

 

that's an average, including heating over the year, in May you should have very low daily daily usage versus say december.

 

Some old gas usage from before they broke the website.