jalexa

Thank you for this very helpful response. It would seem to be summed up by the average statistics that you quote and your statement

"Accordingly the bill cannot be considered excessive and the comparison with your gas heated house is not relevant. Unfortunately electric heating is just expensive whatever the tariff".

Most grateful to you

Mike

Capt Mike:

...you seem to be very knowledgeable with regard to Economy 10 and I would appreciate some help with this tariff....

...Can you suggest an alternative supplier or an alternative tariff that would be less expensive than the present arrangement.

Unfortunately I don't know everything about Economy 10 and/or Heatwise options and its very difficult to get accurate information - even about tariffs. When I tried this morning I could not even get a sample of Consumer Focus accredited websites to calculate average annual consumption in an electric only house. However as a rough guide, in a gas heated house "average" gas is 20,500kWhrs and "avergage" electric is 3,300kWhrs. You will see that the total energy consumption in the house you refer to is well below "average" energy consumption. The split between standard and off-peak is also close to the "average" split of 54.6%.

Accordingly the bill cannot be considered excessive and the comparison with your gas heated house is not relevant. Unfortunately electric heating is just expensive whatever the tariff.

If the house has true (single MPAN) Economy 10 metering you could phone around suppliers and compare unit rates (these cannot be compared online), but I would be surprised if there will be huge difference. Some suppliers offer a (two MPAN) comfort product (eg Heatwise) but these are even harder to compare (and switch).

Unfortunately with an electric wet radiator system, for which Economy 10 is appropriate, the householder is probably stuck. In the first instance I would look again at economy measures such as improved controls, insulation top-up and, given the flexibility of wet radiators, selectively reducing temperature in little used rooms. I trust most rooms already have TRVs?

Jalexa

Please forgive me for butting in, but you seem to be very knowledgeable with regard to Economy 10 and I would appreciate some help with this tariff.

I am trying to help an elderly lady, who lives alone and who seems to have inordinately expensive electricity bills.

The lady lives in a modern semi-detached house in a village without any gas supply and hence has an electricity supply feeding a boiler and wet radiator central heating system. The accommodation comprises kitchen, hall, combined lounge diner, cloakroom, 3 bedrooms and bathroom. The postcode is TA19 9SL and Southern Electric supply the electricity on their Economy 10 tariff.

The latest bill from Southern Electric states that:

"Your electricity usage over the last 12 months was 5583.01kWh standard energy and 6440.66kWh off-peak energy. Based on our current prices, we expect you to pay £1346.41 in the coming 12 months."

This seems excessive: I myself live with my wife in a 5 bedroom detached house and our total energy bill for both gas and electricity is under £1000.

Can you suggest an alternative supplier or an alternative tariff that would be less expensive than the present arrangement.

I would be grateful for any advice you can offer to assist this widowed pensioner with her expensive energy bills.

catcoconut:

I'm thinking the next step is to take pictures and make an appointment to go down to the offices and actually show them the evidence.

Whatever you are comfortable with, though I still advocate my "setting a trap" strategy. Even more so now that you mention the assertion that the council contractor has reported the work done earlier.

My point about the record seeking is that you will obtain written proof what council records actually say, not what "faceless and unattributable" personnel say.

Whatever strategy you follow I would strongly advocate as a first step you obtain a copy of the council complaints procedure and study it closely to see if it describes any mechanisms which might help you.

catcoconut - Usually when a householder has concerns that works may have not been carried out to the prescribed statutory standards as laid down in the building regulations, the building control inspector of your local council is duty bound where asked, to come out free of charge to inspect and / or verify your suspicions.

This could mean your local council shoots itself in the foot and forces them to spend even more to bring the house to the necessary standards, as recommended by their own inspector following his legislative guides, irrespective of past expenditure.

Sorry Jalexa, I didn't realise you had replied.

The problem we seem to be having with the council is that they say they spent £1000s and £1000s on this house in Dec 08 after the previous tenant moved out. He had lived here 50 yrs and from the little information the council have told us it looks like the man had not allowed the council into the property to carry out repairs and modernise the place hence why they spent so much and put in this new heating system.

Since moving here in July '09 nearly every repair or maintenance problem we have asked about has been refused on the grounds of them already paying out so much money on the property. Regarding the loft insulation, we have told them there is barely 25mm in places and none in others but they say this is untrue as their contractors put all new insulation up there when they modernised the house. This may have been what the contractors told their bosses but it certainly isn't true! All we get is someone saying they'll look into it and get back to us but it never happens. I'm thinking the next step is to take pictures and make an appointment to go down to the offices and actually show them the evidence.

catcoconut:

...we have been told we have adequate loft insulation but we dont believe we do as its bare in places and very thin in others up there. We have phoned council twice but they insist it's up to standard...

What do you mean by "they insist"? The only answer in the first instance is what actual thickness they consider to be "unnacceptable", what thickness is currently considered to be "adequate", what thickness they consider to be "optimum" and any programmes (if any) to deliver "optimum" thickness in their housing stock.

I appreciate how unpleasant it is not to be warm and/or in fuel poverty but you need to be firmer in calling the council to account. I would have thought that Freedom of Infomation was an appropriate route to take. Once you have firm information, only then compare what levels of information you have with the housing standards.

In due course if you find you have been misinformed in any way you could gather further information by making a £10 Subject Access Request requiring provison of copies of correspondence, telephone logs and/or transcripts of recordings and copies of file notes about your case. Then make a formal complaint strictly in accordance with the formal complaints procedure.

I have no doubt that the council offices are warm and toasty at your expense, that's assuming they haven't considered the weather too inclement to open, in which case likely the offices are warm and toasty but empty.

Hi,

I believe we have the low temp system, air fan on the outside, into a hydro-box on the inside which heats the water and radiators, these run independent of each other, with plenty of flexibility for the user (me) to change temp etc.

I have been doing twice daily meter checks for over three month and have sheets of them, and I have the splits between standard and off peak. I am at work so dont have the exact figures to hand, (briefly) this is roughly whats been happening :-

Early September heat and water on schedules timers (outside temp not cold) using about 16 units a day, now we had nothing on over the off peak nightime period because the system was timed not to run - we used 0-1 unit (between 12 midnight to 5am). We do have more hours off peak, and the splits look fine. (as an aside we did learn these E10 meter cannot register the changing of the clocks, so when they go back and forward the meter doesn't know, therefore if you think you are using off peak at 12 midnight, you may not be, depending on the time of year).

A month ago we were using 30-40 units, splits looked fine.

From 10.30pm Wednesday night to 10.30pm last night (Thurs) 24 hrs we used 73 units. 25 off peal - 48 standard. (Our neighbor is using 30 units a day with his Altherma)

From 10.30pm last night to this morning at 8.15am we used 29 units 16 standard and 13 off peak.

As far as I am aware the Altherma system just uses electric, and we get off peak rates midnight-5.00am 13.00- 14.00 and 20.00 - 22.00 Economy 10 means 10 hours at off peak rate. Rates are .1353p standard and 0.0704 off peak.

The water temp is set by me, its at 49 degrees and there is a button we can press to check these temps (presuming that part is working correctly).

Bubbagirl:

Bubbagirl (mainly) but also Catcoconut

One thing that is troubling me is that both of you say you are on E10 but haven't posted daily usage (at different times of the year) and very important the breakdown between cheap rate units and full price units and the times?

Do you understand which parts of the heating system uses which price of units?

To Bubbagirl (mainly)

You mention higher water temperatures. Do you know if you have the Low Temperature or the High Temperature system? My understanding of heat pumps is that raising the water temperature a little is economical, but raising it a lot is not. I'm guessing the water tank is using secondary heating but I am not sure what price price electricity is being used.

Hi,

It does sound like we have different systems. We have no indoor thermastat, we can either have it on manually, we can adjust the temperature of the water in the radiators or we can have it on auto outside temp setting, this mean that setting are programmed into the hydro box (the inside unit) saying that if the temp outside is X then the water temp for the radiators will by Y. ie, cold weather 2 degrees outside = 55 degrees water temp in radiators.

Regarding your water, we were told that if you have your water temp set over 50 degrees then the immersion heater will kick in and this will be expensive. We have dropped our water temp down to 49 degrees to ensure that doesn't happen and the water is still hot enough at the temp.

Regarding whether to leave it on 24/7 or at certain times. We have found we use exactly the same (loads) of units either way, it makes no difference on our system. We have also found that by taking the system of auto outside temp setting and reducing the water temp in the radiators to 45 degrees we dont save any units either, which is crazy. It appears that just by having the system ON at any setting/temp it just eats electricity. On your system I dont know if you have the capability to set your own temps.

I know money must be tight, but you can buy low running halogen floor heaters for about £15.00. These use 400W to 1.2Kw to run, I bought one for my mums room. They will the cheapest floor heater you can buy and very safe (re kids). If no one is willing to help you, I would collect loads of old newspapers (free) and put them in your loft, but in this day and age this may be deemed a fire hazard! so beware.

Bubbagirl you said the system takes 3 hrs to get back to temperature once turned off well The engineer that came in and serviced our system told me that it's better to leave it ticking over all day (say 16 degrees) than to turn it off completely as it has to work so much harder to heat up again. He didn't say it how long it took though. We havent been doing that because we were still worried about how much it would cost us but now its got colder i wonder if i should start leaving it on? We try not to turn ours up on the thermostat to more than 20d but we have a rad opposite that knocks the thermostat out.

I have my water timed in to heat up between 3.30am and 5am. Then again at 3pm-4pm. Sometimes we have to switch it on manually in the evening as we seem to run out of hot water quick here. We have the immersion on timed i think. Im trying to work with this electricity monitor and take meter readings but i dont really understand all these readings and watts and kilowatts lol

Our house is incredibly cold, we have been told we have adequate loft insulation but we dont believe we do as its bare in places and very thin in others up there. We have phoned council twice but they insist it's up to standard, they say we cant have cavity wall insulation so im assuming that means we have single brick? All the windows run with water and the bathroom is full of mould. The council will not help with any of these matters.

Thanks for any help.

My first post had such little info, dont worry about any confusion.

Bubbagirl:

I thought our problem was bad, we own the house, so having landlords as an additional problem must be awful.

My apologies. I missed that or confused the posts. I will study your post later and respond if I have any more advice.

TO JALEXO and CATCOCONUT,

Many thanks for your responses.

I thought our problem was bad, we own the house, so having landlords as an additional problem must be awful.

This has been a 2 year struggle for various reasons, I will tell you whats happened in the past 3 months, which really is the important part. Our bills have been astronomical, £3000.00 in the first year, £2200.00 to Aug this year.

We knew we had a serious problem when we received a bill from SE for £720.00 for the period Mid Apr to Mid Aug (4 months) this is summer the heating was off most of the time, but the water was running 24hr a day.

Since August (our last bill) I have been doing 2 meter readings a day, the Altherma was set to work on outiside temperature (which wasn’t cold yet), by default just to save electricity, we put our Altherma system on timed schedules (5.00am - 8.30am) (3.00pm - 10.00pm) we have a split system so the water was put on just 3 hours a day, basically before you need it. This was different to what our nightmare site manager said, run all 24/7 a day. The daily units used late Aug early Sept were acceptable, at this time we were disputing our meter with Southern Electric and they fitted a check meter, we were convinced the meter was ‘jumping on’ as what ever you read about the Altherma system, ITS COST EFFICIENT, 30-50% MORE EFFICIENT THAT FOSSIL FUELS, THE WAY FORWARD FOR THE FUTURE, WARM HOUSES – LOW COST yada yada yada!. Just to note all our estate runs Altherma and we were hearing that no-one else had huge bills, they were all paying about £1200.00 per year to run, even someone in exactly the same house as us paying up to £1500.00 per year and they don’t care how economical they run theirs!

With the system being on timed – we actually had our first small bill £270.00 for the quarter Aug-Nov.

As the weather started to get colder, the electricity usage increased dramatically, still on timed, but we were coldish, because the Altherma take about 3 hours to get back to temp once its been off. We spoke to our neighbors again, who confirmed they were running theirs 24/7 and its was cost efficient. We decided to put our back to 24/7 heat but keep 2 hours a day water, to see if we were using the system wrong and expected to save some units. NO we didn’t, we used loads.

At this point note we have a maintenance contract with a company called Spaceair, which I thought had just run out.

About 2 weeks ago, I sent and email to Daikin and copied it to Spaceair. To cut this saga short, the maintenance contract in fact runs until 18th Dec, after a heated discussion and me stating there was something fundamentally wrong with this system, 2 engineers were sent on Monday. After completely checking the system, they were baffled as to what it was doing, its all set up correctly and running perfectly at optimum settings, but clearly their stats proved it was doing something out of the ordinary that they couldn’t diagnose.

Today is Friday, the director who we are dealing with is no hurry to sort this matter, and I was told by him that if I go directly to Daikin I will invalidate the warranty! We have also been told by a local Altherma installer that Spaceair do this a lot, if you get anyone else to check the system they revoke all warranties and will not deal with you (someone said on another forum that is restricted practice and unlawful). I am not whether Spaceair will help us or not. They may drag things out until our maintenance contact run out, but I believe these systems have a 3 year warranty which has NOT run out!

We are broke, have major arrears, my partners has been diagnosed with depression, and I have my 71 year old, registered disabled mother, living with us, and at some point to save costs, we are going to have to turn the heating off.

We are now seeking legal advice, and it looks like ‘letter of claim’ to Spaceair and Daikin will go ahead if we don’t hear from Spaceair in the next few days.

I have searched the net high and low, trying to find someone else with this problem, although I wish you didn’t have these problems, this shows, there could be major problems with these systems. Ps We are on the Cambs/Norfolk border. I’ll keep you posted.

Bubbagirl:

We have now found that the Altherma system is faulty

I really sympathise with you (and Catcoconut) at having such a complex heating system in a rented property but being liable for the resulting electricity bills. Perhaps I'm being dismissive but I can't imagine anybody in the local authority contact centre knowing anything about how the system works.

I have to ask however, when you say "the system is faulty", do you *know* its faulty or is that based on an assumption because you are using 2-3 times the electricity than others in the estate?

If the system is "faulty" then I would have though that the local authority was responsible. The difficulty will be establishing the "proof". I would be tempted to "set a trap" for the local authority by making a £10 Subject Access Request for all the information the local authority holds on you, specifically to include all the maintenance and inspection records for your Altherma system, but also all correspondence and telephone contact with you (about the system). When you get the records, go through them with a fine tooth comb and compare them with the maintenance checks listed on the Altherma website.

Either you (or Catcoconut) mentioned the difficulty with the electricity monitor, however what you should do is get a handle on your consumption by taking daily meter readings for a week, then weekly readings for a month. The daily readings are particulary useful right now as it is so cold. The instantaneous readings (from the monitor) are useful too as the Altherma will be the main load, unless you have other secondary heating.

The Altherma system is a air-source heat-pump system, heating a water tank which feeds wet radiators (I assume). If the outside air-source was switched off, and the water tank was heated at Economy 10 rates that should not be an excessively expensive system unless room temperatures are excessive (your problem) or insulation standards poor (local authority problem). Try to establish if the external air-source is the problem or the tank secondary heating is the problem and specifically the tank secondary heating is actually connected to the E10 meter. Taking meter readings daily should indicate that. Just quoting the costs is not helpful.