Home and heating

Hello I have just moved into a one bedroom property (one open plan living area/kitchen downstairs) and one loft space bedroom upstairs. I am electricity only and am racking up useage of £90 a month. I am not using my heating (it's 9° inside!) I'm not using my washing machine or electric shower I can't understand how I'm using so much electricity.  I have been away for work from Monday to Wednesday evening this week and used 29kwh. Is this normal usage for just a fridge, a router and 2 smoke alarms? I'm too scared to put my heating on. I have not lived in an electric only property before so don't really know what is normal monthly expenditure for a one bedroom property? Any help would be appreciated.

We live in Cornwall and have just had our oil tank removed. Do we go with Air source heat pump? We live in a 5 bedroom bunglow, which is made from shutter concrete. We have double glazing and we be having new insulated roofs added.

Have just bought a house with night storage heaters. To begin with I didn’t think they were working but this morning they were all just slightly warm despite being turned up to max. Is this usual (e.g. if they hadn’t been used for a long time)?

Hi. I live in Scotland and had old fashioned storage heaters. I had the flat rewired so the old storage heaters came out and I bought Dimplex Quantum heaters to go in. Meanwhile, OVO installed me a smart meter in January and the engineer who installed it said I’d need to contact OVO to get the new meter upgraded to a 5 port version to accommodate the new storage heaters. Sounded straightforward, but on contacting OVO they now tell me I can’t have a dual rate meter and will have to run the system on the single rate. End of. They are very sorry etc. It’ll be unaffordable! Reading posts on this Forum, I can see there are the SMETS2 meters available - so what’s the problem I’m having? Any advice or suggestions very welcome. Thanks

IEC 1107 port? Where is it and how do you get a reading from it Please. Our Landis Gyr E110 meter has become faulty and shows no Digit at the 10,000 space. Consequently we are receiving no payment for one of the sunniest 1/4s ever. I have looked it up and the brochure indicates that if you access the above port you can read the memory and we should be able to get a reading. Can anyone advise Please.  I have tried to ask L&G they won’t come back to me. I have tried several P.V. electricians who similarly don’t seem to know how to do this. The only advise I have found was an Indian you tube which sadly I don’t understand but seemed to show exactly what I need. Please help, asking on behalf of my nonagenarian father

Wondered if anyone can answer my query Im an existing FIT payment receiver (solar panels installed with single string inverter 11 years ago) so receive a decent FIT payment. Recently had installed a EcoFlow 3.6kw inverter with 10kw battery storage, the generation meter was changed to a bidirectional meter as instructed and followed the correct schematic. However the meter is showing a negative number and I can’t seem to work out what the solar panels are generating apart from what shows in the EcoFlow app We charge the batteries up at night using an off peak rate and then any solar during the day tops the batteries up. am I correct in thinking there should be another meter of sort between the solar panels and inverter just to monitor the generation from The solar panels? installers seem to think by summer it will change to a positive but that’s no good to me right now when I’ve generated about 30kw of solar   

My smart meter is configured to economy 10 and switches port 5 (the heating port) on and off as per the tariff times. My question is this during the off peak hours does my meter record all electricity used on port 5 and port 1 at the single off peak rate or does the smart meter only apply the off peak rate to port 5 while charging the port 1 consumption at peak rate 24 / 7 and only port5 at off peak when port 5 is connected

Hi please can someone help advise whether Ovo will install an additional GivEnergy battery for me to extend my system.I believe GivEnergy are no more , so once physically installed how do you configure the battery as I understand that GivEnergy needed to send some instruction to the inverter any help and guidance really appreciated Thanks colin  

Hi, we currently are on economy 9 tariff and have four 20+ years old Dimplex XL storage heaters. Is there a more slimline version/up to date alternative? More efficient would also help.We are both in our seventies and really haven't got a clue, I have looked online but I'm even more confused now?Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.  

Please can someone tell me what the new Export Tariff is from 1st April 2026. My advice email tells me the new FIT tariff but not the the new Export Tariff. What is the RPI increase date that OVO use? Any help please. 

Solarman app on iphone not providing daily solar production. I did reinstalled the logger on my 8kw Megarevo with no success. Any suggestion please?? 

Is Ovo boiler cover any good?

Cadent managed to cut through the mains electricity cable to our house earlier today.... Just our house has been impacted. I don't think Cadant have been careful all week with their digging.... Cadent are in the process of replacing all the mains gas pipes in our area so have been digging in the area for weeks UK Power Networks were quickly on the scene after we told them. Cadent hadn't even told UK Power when we phoned... But UK Power Networks couldn't start work until Cadent made the area safe. No eta to get fixed yet. Just wondering is it worth putting in a complaint to Cadant? I would rather not claim on house insurance for  spoiled food. UK Power have been excellent keeping us informed, Cadent useless.  

I have been with OVO for over 20 years but recently my attempt to upgrade to an Air Sourced Heat Pump and also get a Solar plus battery survey and feasibility assessment has been a total failure and as a result I have left OVO and joined OCTOPUS who within just 10 days have got everything assessed and sorted . By comparison the designated OVO assessor cancelled his appointment at very short notice, made a new appointment and then failed to show up. I phoned his number and emailed and left messages to reschedule but received no reply and when I visited my OVO account ALL the publicity and links to the ASHP and Solar plus battery offers had been removed so I must assume that OVO has PAUSED ITS CAMPAIGN FOR LOGICAL or other reasons. WHY DID IT ALL GO SO WRONG?

I am exploring the possibility of asking my energy supplier to  design an Air Source Heat Pump- plus small Condensing Gas Boiler Hybrid System as this would appear to offer the best of both worlds and enable the whole C/H system to work both efficiently and give strong ‘on demand’ heating and hot water ‘on tap’ plus a degree of resilience against individual unit performance degradation. DO any OVO Forum members have first hand experience of design, installation and use of such a system? This Hybrid approach is intended to be an alternative to having an ASHP for whole house background heating and hot water storage plus a balanced flue gas fire added into the living room or lounge to cater for all those sudden ‘on demand’ room heating moments during the year. at a similar overall installation cost (but with the potential for a more intelligent control program to be applied) that is essentially an enhanced ‘fit, setup and forget’  solution to home heating for the future. Apparently, as lo

Hello everyone — our house is about 32 years old, and we're debating whether to spend money on new insulation or replace some of our windows first. If you've tackled insulation and air sealing projects, what improvements did you notice in terms of comfort, energy bills, and overall home efficiency?

Back again with a weird one. I’ve had to chase Octopus a couple of times for Outgoing payment since starting tariff in March. Which they have done when asked, just prefer not to be asking. Anyway since the last payment the Solar export figures have been way down. With the decent weather we’d been getting payments anywhere up to £1.15 per day. But as of last Weds after the payment they gave us most we have received is 19p. And we have had some amazing sun. Our usage hasn’t changed in the house but it’s dropped right off. It’s not as though it’s not doing its thing it’s just not as much as I would of expected considering it’s getting warmer.Does something weird happen to panels if it’s very hot? Any insight would be really appreciated.Also they’ve been in a year now do they ever need cleaning?