Would anyone kindly help with converting a very old imperial meter reading to kwh please?

@BPLightlog Just for clarification and fun: I don’t have a gas meter, but from what I read the meter will show consumption in 100s of ft³ (with 10s in red and units on the clockface). That’s why the conversion imperial > metric is x 2.83: 100 ft³ = 2.83 m³ (and 1m³ = 35.31 ft³).

This meter shows that it has measured more than 14,000 m³ in its 38 years of life, unless of course it was reset at some point. That’s enough gas to pump up 40,000 lilos or to give more than 150MWh of energy.

497,432 ft³ x 2.83 = 14,085.71 m³

Yes 👍🏼 . I was trying to be clear with the 2.83 factor already a given and the usual advice to ignore the red dial

Thank you, however, is it not measuring in ft2 not 100’s ft2 ?. I have a small 3 bed semi, a new combi boiler, heating that runs just 5 hrs a day with the stat set at 20. A recent test shows no loss of gas anywhere in the house and boiler regularly properly serviced.

Taking all that into account my meter reported last year’s usage as 46000kwh. (4 x national average for a similar property. Cost of £5k.

My ajoining neighbour also lives alone, her heating runs 14 hrs/day and her usage if ¼ of mine.

So I am confused and concerned.

I think it’s ft3 rather than 100ft3. But it’s not clear because of that red zero on the end which confuses things a lot.

However, there’s another possible factor - the age of the meter comes into play here. I think your gas meter might be near the end of service life, so you might want to consider getting it replaced soon. That might have something to do with it.

It is a very old meter @Colin W and it could well be past it’s ‘sell by’ date. 
You can clearly see from the faceplate that it’s measuring in ft3 

The siting of the units shows what was mentioned - the red dial is tens of units the 0 static but indicating single units and the revolving dial showing a full rotation for a single unit (marked at half way 0.5)

As long as you have been using just the units to the left of the Red to give readings that would be correct. If you’re usage is so high, it could be that the calibration is too far out

Yeah, we’re talking an ancient 1985 gas meter manufactured by a company that no longer exists and it’s successors are no longer involved in the energy industry as far as I can tell.

I get the feeling the accuracy of that meter has plummeted through the floor. A meter accuracy test is probably worth considering before you go to replacing it completely.

Just to confirm, this is from the gov website 

explaining what the readings show (bottom one is imperial) and what reading to give (without the red digits)

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/gas-meter-readings-and-bill-calculation

I think the OVO Energy app might be able to decipher that meter as well. It gained camera based meter dial scanning functionality a couple of years ago (totally pinched from the SSE app!) which should be able to handle these meters. I’d be surprised if it couldn’t.

I just wondered if the reading was being given including the red digits which would have the effect of a large amount of gas used