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How warm?

Does what it says on the tin
JessUK98
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Re: How warm?

#108919

Postby JessUK98 » January 9th, 2018, 9:31 am

Snorvey wrote:I'm all electric and since getting the new windows and doors fitted, my DD account is well in credit at £60pm.

The winter has been relatively mild..... So far!


:shock:
Out of interest how much do you pay a month usually? I'm all electric as well. In the winter my D/D is around £50 p/m.
I've recently got triple glazing (best thing ever, well other than my dishwasher). I've recently also put in "intelligent" electric heaters which I've been favouring over my multi fuel stove recently (laziness at its best). I put all of them on yesterday and used 18 units of electricity in 5 hours(!). Usually only put bedroom heater on and for hour in morning and hour in evening, and living room heaters on for 4-5 hours in the evening. With immersion heater on for an hour in order to heat up water for morning and evening washes and other general day to day stuff, I usually only use around 21 units every day (In the summer I only used around 9-12 units a day). I keep putting meter readings in expecting them to up my monthly D/D but they keep telling my I'm still "on track" and keeping my monthly payment at £50.73! I'm currently in debit by around £52 so interesting to see when they do decide to increase my D/D (I remember many moons ago when I only used to only pay £13 p/m!).

Dod101
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Re: How warm?

#108933

Postby Dod101 » January 9th, 2018, 10:54 am

I am amazed at some of the numbers for heating and lighting. I would not like to tell you how much I pay for heating (CH and water) and then lighting. I admittedly like to keep the house warm but even so it is not as if I live in a mansion! Double glazed, well insulated, what am I doing wrong?

Detached, not a bungalow, but well spread out single story place with three large bedrooms. In fact all rooms are quite big I guess. maybe that has something to do with it.

Dod

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Re: How warm?

#108948

Postby dspp » January 9th, 2018, 11:39 am

A friend of mine pays about £4,000/yr for light + heat in a 5-bed. It was £5,000/yr until they started putting in insulation. Each year they do another room (gut & line with ins PB etc). So each year the house gets warmer and the bills get less. Ignoring it won't solve it.

regards, dspp

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Re: How warm?

#108955

Postby PetraM » January 9th, 2018, 11:57 am

dspp wrote:A friend of mine pays about £4,000/yr for light + heat in a 5-bed. It was £5,000/yr until they started putting in insulation. Each year they do another room (gut & line with ins PB etc). So each year the house gets warmer and the bills get less. Ignoring it won't solve it.

regards, dspp


How much ???

We have a modern (late 20th Century), "executive" 5 bed house. OK, we have solar panels but they don't do very much in the winter.

We pay under £100 a month for dual fuel (I'm not sure of the exact figure without looking it up.) We run the heating system so that the house is never below 15 nor above 20. (Except for now with our heating fault (see other thread) where the temperature can get up to 28 before it becomes so unbearable in the bedrooms that we're woken up by it and have to go down and switch the boiler off.)

BTW, we consider this "too much" and will be adding more loft insulation in the summer.

Dod101
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Re: How warm?

#108959

Postby Dod101 » January 9th, 2018, 12:04 pm

As it happens I have just done a full year of tracking my expenses (as I reported elsewhere) and in 2017 I spent £4,425 although that is maybe higher than actual usage because I buy oil in 2000 litre deliveries.That breaks down as electricity £1700, Oil £1800 and logs £925. This place is well insulated and consists of a cottage, stone built around 1840, and a modern extension of about three times the size of the cottage all on one level, so lots of outside walls, double glazed and well insulated under the floor and in the loft.

Oh dear! Just switched off the heating. I think that is too much, needless to say.
Dod

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Re: How warm?

#108960

Postby Watis » January 9th, 2018, 12:11 pm

Dod101 wrote:As it happens I have just done a full year of tracking my expenses (as I reported elsewhere) and in 2017 I spent £4,425 although that is maybe higher than actual usage because I buy oil in 2000 litre deliveries.That breaks down as electricity £1700, Oil £1800 and logs £925. This place is well insulated and consists of a cottage, stone built around 1840, and a modern extension of about three times the size of the cottage all on one level, so lots of outside walls, double glazed and well insulated under the floor and in the loft.

Oh dear! Just switched off the heating. I think that is too much, needless to say.
Dod


That's a lot of electricity! Are you still using incandescent bulbs?

Logs: aren't you able to 'pick your own' from a nearby wood, perhaps?

Watis

Dod101
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Re: How warm?

#108972

Postby Dod101 » January 9th, 2018, 12:34 pm

I thought the electricity looked high. Now discovered that it includes some electricians work. The usage is actually a mere £1125 and that brings the total down to £3850, which seems to me still to be an awful lot. Just donned an extra sweater. Thanks Watis, down to you.

Dod

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Re: How warm?

#108993

Postby Sussexlad » January 9th, 2018, 1:47 pm

Three bedroom semi, DG, cavity-wall, deep loft insulation. We are retired and are here much of the time. The hall stat is set as follows. with a non-TRV radiator. All others have them and the bedrooms are set on 2/3. There is no other heating, well there is an electric fire but I only use the flame effect.

1) 0600 20.0C
2) 0900 17.5C
3) 1400 21.0C
4) 1500 21.0C
5) 1800 22.0C
6) 2200 16.0C

I never turn the heating off, on the basis that is what the controls are for and if there's a cold spell in summer, I want the heating to come on !

I've just switched to a May 2020 tariff and my gas will cost £400 a year until then.

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Re: How warm?

#109000

Postby richlist » January 9th, 2018, 1:58 pm

Modern 5 bed detached built early 1990s

D/glazed upvc, 12'' loft insulation, cavity wall ins, low energy bulbs, double jacket on hot water tank, hot pipes insulated, foil behind rads, TRV 's on rads, dual rate electricity, linings on curtains, external lighting on timers, wood burner to supplement gas c/heating, high current draw appliances run on timers on low rate electricity,

Just added porch to entrance to minimised loss and gave all my thick jumpers to charity.

I pay £80 a month.......just had 14 solar panels installed so expecting that to drop significantly, to early to tell at the moment.

Not bad considering we have a hot tub running on 24/7.

bungeejumper
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Re: How warm?

#109188

Postby bungeejumper » January 10th, 2018, 10:29 am

Wow, what a lot of divergence in our energy spends. We're down in the softy south west, and we spend around £1,300 a year on gas and another £900 or so on electricity. (Yes, were almost entirely on LED lighting now, but we have quite a lot of electronic gear on the go (Busy busy - those bitcoins won't mine themselves, you know. :lol:) I probably have a kilowatt's worth running in my office, and I suppose the heat it gives off is reducing our other heating bills one way or another, so maybe that's not so bad?

We'd probably have at least some double glazing if the listed buildings people would let us, but they won't. (Permission tends to vary with the mood of the local heritage bods, and ours flatly refuse to allow it.) It's not as if we had a priceless architectural gem, either - just a good-sized one-off Victorian pile in a country area. It's wasteful, it's annoying, and it puts a new spin on the word conservation. ;)

Mind you, what would I do with the £1,000 a year of savings that we could perhaps save if we blew £30K on architecturally-sensitive double glazing? Probably spend it on financing the double glazing. :lol: Or, if we bought the cheaper stuff, I might find I've saved enough to finance a pint of beer a day. A grand a year isn't such a big deal, all things considered.

BJ

Dod101
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Re: How warm?

#109194

Postby Dod101 » January 10th, 2018, 10:47 am

Before moving to where I am now I also had a nice Victorian house and although mine was not in a conservation area, we had the original sash windows and had internal Everest double glazing which was effective but cumbersome. Worth it though for the effect on general comfort never mind any cost saving. With Victorian houses there is in my experience never any risk sealing it up because we got plenty of fresh air through the floors!

A saving of £1,000 would be very welcome to me and now that I have had my mind focussed on it, I aim to bring down my heating and lighting costs (although I am largely LED where it matters I think)

Dod

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Re: How warm?

#109209

Postby bungeejumper » January 10th, 2018, 12:24 pm

we had the original sash windows and had internal Everest double glazing which was effective but cumbersome.

Aaah, Everest. We were out in the garden one day when the man from Everest came round and said that there had been "complaints" about our high energy usage, and he was there to offer us a way of avoiding a lot of trouble. I squashed that one before he'd had time to open his mouth for his third sentence.

He lost no time in switching tracks. Everest now had a range of fitted kitchens at special prices, he said, and would I like to call "the little lady of the house" into the garden so that he could show her his brochure? Whereupon "the little lady of the house" emerged from behind a rose bush, waving a threatening pair of long-handled loppers, and he was gone so fast that he left his glasses behind. :lol:

BJ

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Re: How warm?

#109217

Postby JMN2 » January 10th, 2018, 12:51 pm

bungeejumper wrote:
we had the original sash windows and had internal Everest double glazing which was effective but cumbersome.

Aaah, Everest. We were out in the garden one day when the man from Everest came round and said that there had been "complaints" about our high energy usage, and he was there to offer us a way of avoiding a lot of trouble. I squashed that one before he'd had time to open his mouth for his third sentence.

He lost no time in switching tracks. Everest now had a range of fitted kitchens at special prices, he said, and would I like to call "the little lady of the house" into the garden so that he could show her his brochure? Whereupon "the little lady of the house" emerged from behind a rose bush, waving a threatening pair of long-handled loppers, and he was gone so fast that he left his glasses behind. :lol:

BJ


Might have been the same chap who sells Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door at a mere eur3800 a pop. Yes, 3800 euros, domestic use.

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Re: How warm?

#109299

Postby panamagold » January 10th, 2018, 7:42 pm

bungeejumper wrote:.... would I like to call "the little lady of the house" into the garden so that he could show her his brochure? Whereupon "the little lady of the house" emerged from behind a rose bush, waving a threatening pair of long-handled loppers, and he was gone so fast that he left his glasses behind. :lol:
BJ


Seemingly made a spectacle of himself.

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Re: How warm?

#110262

Postby PrincessB » January 13th, 2018, 6:05 pm

I've just re-read the thread, great information and comment.

bungeejumper,

We'd probably have at least some double glazing if the listed buildings people would let us, but they won't.


You may be able to retrofit vacuum insulated panels - Link below:
https://www.pilkington.com/en-gb/uk/pro ... ton-spacia

Essentially two panes of glass with pipples to keep the vacuum gap open. Apparently you can only see the pipple grid when you're pretty close up.

response to Dod101 by Watis,

That's a lot of electricity! Are you still using incandescent bulbs?


I've still got 14 incadescent bulbs of which only two are using a significant amount of electricity.

The two 120watt halogens live in the wall lights in the dining room and are on all evening every evening and responsible for about 10% of the total electric bill. There are no LED replacements that provide sufficient lumens to replace the halogens at this time.

response to JessUK98 by dspp

Move the wardrobe and chest of drawers. Move them to internal walls. That way you get air circulation against the inside of an external wall. That will reduce the condensation by re-evaporating it.


We once 'borrowed' a house from some friends who happened to be on holiday while we were between houses. They had similar problems and solved it by the brute force method.

Brute force in this case meant removing the backs of the wardrobes along with the doors. They then put in rails at the front of the wardrobes and hung very light curtains to hide the clothes. It all looked a bit student, but it worked.

Regards,

B.

JessUK98
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Re: How warm?

#110587

Postby JessUK98 » January 15th, 2018, 11:01 am

PrincessB wrote:We once 'borrowed' a house from some friends who happened to be on holiday while we were between houses. They had similar problems and solved it by the brute force method.

Brute force in this case meant removing the backs of the wardrobes along with the doors. They then put in rails at the front of the wardrobes and hung very light curtains to hide the clothes. It all looked a bit student, but it worked.


Having just forked out for new bedroom furniture I think I'm gonna give that idea a miss thanks :lol:
I have bought some small space dehumidifier bags and placed them in all the drawers nearest the walls and the wardrobe though to see if that helps. Also when I was drying my hair this morning I pointed the hairdryer down the side of the wardrobe. Don't know if that will achieve anything other than the dog looking at me funny though, but I told her I was attempting to circulate some air :D .


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