[ianP]

With prices likely to rise in the Spring, and my usage already seemingly high, i have been trying to cut my consumption over the winter. Does anyone know what a reasonable level of electricity usage is in terms of units?

i have found myself not putting the under floor heating on at all in an effort to control usage. We use between 18 and 20 units a day without it. I am in a 80 plus meter square flat. We use elec for cooking, only use the booster on our hot water boiler but do have a dishwasher and a washing machine that is maybe on twice a day or more.

we have a smart meter but as all the meters for our block of 50 flats are in the basement, not only does it not communicate with my flat but it also doesn't communicate with Eon so I am having to do regular meter readings and device by device usage monitoring is impossible.

according to Eon they are waiting on a govt firmware fix before the meter will communicate with them.

I do follow some energy saving advice. (E.g letting the sun heat my main room in the day and then shutting the curtains at night (we have a big floor to ceiling window) and that kind of works.

i would just like to be able to cut my usage down as prices are presumably going to skyrocket.

[theunknowntech]

Hiya!

This is actually a really, really tricky one to answer because it heavily depends on your own circumstances. I'll try to spend some time thinking about this one, but it may take me a couple days. Hang in there for now and I'll keep you posted.

Thanks!

[Beki]

Hey @ianP, I often recommend customers to the Energy Saving Trust. There is such a wealth of knowledge and energy saving tips out there. Perhaps it's something someone could start a thread for 🤔

[theunknowntech]

I'm back! Sorry for the wait.

Before I go further, I should mention that everyone is unique, and my own usage may be very different to your own. I'm also not with E.On or E.On Next myself, which is another factor that will likely cause differences here. I do however, live in a flat by myself with underfloor heating. When it's running I only seem to use a little bit extra electricity vs when it's not running - maybe the odd extra 1kWh a day or so at the very most. However, it's also possible that my underfloor heating might be hooked up to a different electric meter that my landlord pays for, rather than to my own meter - a clue to which is that heating is a list item on my service charges as part of the tenancy agreement. I'm not sure if my heating really is hooked up to the landlord supply and there's not really a way to find out without ripping up the flat so I'd rather not try. I also don't have a gas supply at all, as my flat is all-electric (and I like it that way!). I suspect my hot water is probably also running on the landlord supply as well, so I don't think I pay for that directly.

In actual fact, despite things like my overpowered home network setup and several powerful laptops (I have my reasons, honest guv!)... On average across my entire flat I only use around 20-30kWh of electricity per week in total, which obviously varies depending on what I'm doing. But what I do know is that my usage is also massively lower than most people in similar circumstances, somewhere around 70% lower (somehow!) as the average similar home to me is said to use around 70-100kWh a week. I'm afraid I can't calculate comparisons for anyone else as it relies on certain tools that only work for me.

While I can't really run the numbers for anyone else in any way that's even close to being able to do them myself, I can at least tell you that much. Hopefully it helps you out in some way.

As for your meter... Yeah... Blocks of flats are a nightmare. There's new Dual-Band Comms Hubs slowly becoming available which are helping to solve that problem, but only for SMETS2 sites. It is said that a DBCH should enable up to 95% of sites in the UK to have enough HAN range to cover everything - including the electric meter, gas meter and In-Home Display. There's still more work needed for the rest, but other solutions are being investigated for those. In most cases though, a Single Band Comms Hub is fine, but a Dual-Band Comms Hub will work for even more of them.

SMETS1 however, is another story. Sadly, there's no way to get Dual-Band Comms Hubs for S1 sites without doing a Meter Exchange to upgrade the entire site to S2. I can also confirm from personal experience that the Enrolment & Adoption process is a brilliant move which will hopefully wake up a few million S1 meters and bring them back to life, but it's not flawless. My own site and those of some of my friends were among the very first to be migrated and it unfortunately bricked them, which resulted in us all being upgraded to S2. Not everyone will have that problem however. There's several million S1 meters that have successfully migrated to DCC and reconnected without too much trouble, but there's always going to be issues that will inevitably creep in with such a huge project.