Help for low income customers

Another point with gas central heating is you can turn the boiler temperature down so your radiators aren’t as hot. Try aiming for 60 degrees. That means the boiler won’t have to stop/start too often to keep the rooms at the target set on your thermostat. 

No, it’s usually estimated, but I now provide monthly meter readings a day or two before each bill is due, so that I can keep them as accurate as possible.
You advise meter reading the day AFTER the billing period ends?
Ok, I will try that for this month and submit new meter readings tomorrow, as my billing periods are from the 3rd to the 4th of the month.
See if anything changes.

Hey ​@DaveThorn76,

If you think your meter is running a bit too quickly, don’t worry! We’ve got a useful article below that can offer some helpful tips to get to the bottom of it. 

Nukecad brought up a great point about meter readings! If you haven’t submitted any recently, the billing system might be estimating your bills based on last year's usage, which would likely be higher if you were keeping a comfortable temperature in the property. Do you have access to your online account to check when the last readings were updated?

Also, adjusting your temperatures and finding ways to make the property more energy-efficient are fantastic ideas from Julia and Bendog. These adjustments could really help in lowering your future bills, so it’s worth considering!

Since you do not already have them, I think that you could benefit from arranging to get smart meters fitted. This would allow you to see when and how much energy you use throughout a day. It also allows you to see, relatively quickly, what small or large changes make to your usage and costs.

The outside temperature, definitely, has an impact on your energy use. In December our average cost per day for gas was £2. In January our average cost per day for gas was £2.54. The average lowest temperature where I live in December was 4°C while in January it was 2°C.

​@DaveThorn76 The rationale for submitting readings the day AFTER your billing period end (ie. on the first day of a new billing period) is that manually submitted readings are allocated to the begining of the day they are submitted.

So a reading submitted on the first day of a billing period is applied to midnight at the end of the just ended billing period.

May I enter a plea here?

Quoting prices to illustrate changes is often not very helpful. Your example shows an increase in cost of 27%, but we have no way of knowing whether:

• Consumption increased;
• The price per unit increased;
• The standing charge per day increased;
• Some combination of the above happened.

We know that the capped cost per unit of gas for the typical household decreased by over 9% from December to January, while the standing charge increased by over 3%. On top of this confusion, we don’t know whether the figures you quote include the standing charge and VAT or not. Of course, since the rate of VAT didn’t change, whether it’s included or not makes no difference to the 27% increase you’re showing. But it would make a non-insignificant difference if, say, Dave were comparing his own numbers to yours.

In general, I’d say it’s almost always best to stick to quoting usage figures, in kWh where available (that means waiting a few days for reliable data, because the CV of the gas consumed isn’t known until a day or two after the fact). It’s quite likely that a change from one month to another is at least partly explained by a change in the amount of heating needed, itself in turn partly dependent on the weather.

Sorry for being an old pedant!

🧐

I knew that I had forgotten to add something to this post. (It was the second time that I had tried to post - the first one had failed to post. I got the “Something has gone wrong” message.)

I failed to mention, this time, that I am on a fix that finishes in August 2026. So no tariff cost changes were involved between December and January.

I used the price comparison to show that weather conditions have a definite effect on usage and cost. I just failed to include the context both regarding the tariff and that the standing charge and VAT are included in those figures.

I have written a 1000 times: I must do better!🐶🤣

Thanks!

Having a combi-boiler and no immersion tank, I’ve just adjusted the temperatures for the Heating and Hot Water down to 45 degrees each (They were set at 60 and 55 degrees respectively)
Will send new meter readings now, and see if this makes any difference at the end of the current billing period/month!

With a combi boiler, you also have another option. They have a facility that keeps a small amount of hot water always instantly available. This means that it is heating that water, because it cools naturally, several times a day. It is possible to turn this function off. It just means that when you turn on a tap, you may have to wait a short while before you get hot water. 

Yep.
I think that option on ours is turned off, as I have to run the hot tap for a few seconds before the hot water comes out.
After having a quick google at optimum boiler temperatures, I’ve nudged both back up to 50 degrees.