Hey, We've just kinda been forced into having smart meters installed, in a sense that the tariff with smart meters was considerably cheaper than the others on offer so it made sense to make the switch now. The upside is it's a SMETS2 meter so we can switch supplier and retain functionality. I'm trying to set a budget for both gas and electricity daily, but other than waiting a week or two to see what our average weekday and weekend usage is, I was wondering if any of you have set budgets and what you think a realistic target is? We live in a 2 bed, just me, the wife and the hound. All bulbs are LED and we only use gas for CH. Oven and hob are electric. Anyone advise? Thanks.
Well, I'm in a two-bed with converted loft making it a three-bed back-to-back terrace (so only one external wall, which in theory drops the cost of heating a bit - but then it's also over a century old, so that'll bump the cost of heating back up again.) Two little kids, so plenty of TV use (and it's an old energy-hungry thing, pre-LED backlights); gas central heating, gas hobs, electric oven; I'm at home all day on the 'puter, so that bumps things up; LED bulbs everywhere. Here's the last full week's energy usage: The one tailing off at the end there is gas - must have been warm on Sunday - and the fairly stable one's electric. According to that, I spent £12.10 in 'leccy and £9.87 in gas for a £21.97 total - £4.54 more than the week before, probably 'cos the nights are drawing in. If you're out all day - and therefore using no gas and minimal electric - your figures will almost certainly be lower than mine.
Thanks, Gareth. Interestingly, the meter's default budget was £2 per day for gas and £1.80 per day for electricity. I didn't have any reference to know if that was optimistic or inflated to make the user think they're doing well. I've been in all day today with TV and PC on and only used £0.75 worth of electricity up to now. Gas is a different story at £1.70 (the wife HAS to have the thermostat on 22c....) but both of those figures are inclusive of the standing daily charge, so not mega high usage I don't feel.
In a 3 bed detached we used to use an average over the year of 80 q month. Lower actuals in summer, higher in winter obviously. New house is larger and leakier and more like 120.
We've got smart meters here. Firstly take that the in home display tells you with a pinch of salt, its wrong ! Its only designed to be used as a visual aid, not to actually base your bills upon. During the summer ours thought we were averaging around a pound a day or just over. We got our first bill through and were quite astounded to see the usual £55 a month wasn't covering us, and we've had to increase to £68 a month. For comparison, three bed mid terraced property, 3 kids and the two of us.
Smart meters are NOT designed to save you money! They are designed to save the electricity supplier money, by allowing them to "streamline" the number of meter readers they have to employ.
That's quite interesting, and the opposite of what E.on told us. I'm not sure if there are differences between the supplier's meters and how they interact with billing, but we were told that this shows our precise consumption (to 0.001 of a kWh in fact) and is used for billing purposes as it automatically sends kWh usage over the air every 30 minutes. I totally get that, which is why I've held off for SMETS2 meter rollout, meaning I can chop and change to a cheaper supplier as I see fit and the smart meters will still function. There's a new automatic energy supplier switching service (https://migrate.co.uk/) which will automatically change you to the cheapest deal, without the need for you to do ANYTHING. Once our current contract expires, I'll be using this service moving forward.
Remember this - if your new "smart meter" is billing based on kVAh (not kWh), you most likely end up paying more, regardless of a lower tariff. Most house appliances have power factor of 0.8-0.9 (crappy led/fluorescent lamps, SMPS without PFC as bad as 0.5, with passive PFC - around 0.85) , so you can expect your consumption to increase by 20% "out of thin air". And then there is this. .
Thanks for the heads up. I'm in kWh on this one. Thankfully, should there ever raise a question of the meter's accuracy, I've got the last 7 years worth of E.on bills saved (1 years of which in this house) so I know what my month to month kWh usage is - and more importantly, so do they.
2 bed semi here also. Generally spend is £1 a day in the week and £2 at the weekend in the summer then add an additional £1 a day during winter. Budgets seem pretty pointless to me, they don’t save you any money unless your willing to live like a caveman.
£1 per day for both fuels combined? That's incredibly economical! I intend to set an average weekend day usage as the budget, seeing as though we do more washing, tumble drying, cooking, ironing etc at the weekend. If I go over a bit, I won't be too concerned. Based on my kWh usage over the last 12 months, at my current tariff rates, I should be paying around £1500 for the year, so an average of £4.11 per day. I had the entire day at home yesterday and finished on £3.61 so we'll see what the daily consumption is like by the end of the weekend. Because we don't have a combi boiler with HW on demand, I've already reduced my HW on times based on yesterday's usage and it's brought the bill down significantly for today. I didn't realise I was wasting so much gas. In that respect, it's already saved me money I guess.
I recently switched to Octopus Energy, partly because their standard rates were one of the lowest for me (and they don't switch you onto an expensive rate after a year) but also because I wanted to try out their 'Agile Octopus' plan, which charges you a different rate every 30 minutes based on the current wholesale price of electricity. The idea is that you shift your usage (e.g. washing machine and dishwasher on timers) to the times when electricity is cheapest and end up saving money. They have an API to allow you to access your usage and the price history so I've been keeping track of it but so far (been on it for a few months now) it actually seems slightly more expensive than their standard tariff, despite my attempts to avoid using power during peak times Quite a fun programming exercise to plot the data from the API though This is an average day for me: In the plot, A is total spend for the day based on Agile tariff, F is based on the Fixed tariff, totals in brackets include the standing charge. You can see the dishwasher running between 00:30 and 02:00, the washing machine between 11:00 and 13:00 and the oven at 19:00) By the way, if anyone wants to switch to Octopus you can use my referral code https://share.octopus.energy/ice-burn-918 to get £50 off (and I get £50 too)
