Are there conditions to the free electricity offer?

Yeah we don’t have an electric vehicle, or electric heating (and it’s summer anyway). We have a water tank that uses gas, our shower is set to 6min max.

i think actually that might be the usage for the water tank being heated up by gas, which would make sense. 

just looked at my usage for yesterday, another day we had free hours between 9am and 10am and no usage all day, is showing up. I even jotted down in notes when I thought likely to be having high usage so I could look back at it, to see if reflected. 

so definitely an issue with the meter sending recordings, perhaps signal dropping in and out.

Yeah we don’t have an electric vehicle, or electric heating (and it’s summer anyway). We have a water tank that uses gas, our shower is set to 6min max.

 

its just doesn’t make any sense what could even be happening at that time.

 

just looked at my usage for yesterday, another day we had free hours between 9am and 10am and no usage all day, is showing up. I even jotted down in notes when I thought likely to be having high usage so I could look back at it, to see if reflected. 
so definitely an issue with the meter sending recordings.

 

and a bit more investigation, something is definitely going wrong…. Some days is 0.00kw for hours at a time all day, even though the fridge/freezer will be on. And I’m working froM home everyday so lights are on, my screen is on (I do use a laptop)

It would only be an electric shower that used that amount of energy. 

That’s quite normal. It can be 24 hours before a days’ data are retrieved and made available on the website. The one hour’s-worth of data you saw there belongs to the last hour of the previous day when using GMT. The whole energy industry works in GMT all the year round, but times are converted to BST for the convenience (or sometimes confusion) of customers like us.

You should try and track down what it is that is drawing so much power 07:00-08:00 and 17:30-19:00. Your In-Home Display (IHD) should alert you when something big starts up, with perhaps a red light and a scary number. If that sort of consumption is happening every day, it could be costing you £60 a month. Let us know if you need help with the detective work.

Your IHD should also show you the most recent energy usage up to last complete hour before now as it is directly connected to your smart meter whereas, as ​@Firedog said, data collection services only pick up the information every 24 hours or thereabouts. There may also be a processing and display delay depending on who your energy supplier is.

​@ctify are those charts for gas or electricity ?

I was wondering that myself, but the last two posted show it clearly.

They are total use, both electricity and gas, it says so at the top of the pages.

​@ctify In your app be sure to select Electricity on the usage page so that it only shows your electricty use:

Then when you view the chart it will say at the top that it’s your electricity usage only:

​@Nukecad I don’t know anything about gas. If the 4.26 kWh figure was largely gas, bearing in mind that ctify says there was no big electricity consumption at the time, would that have been converted from m³ using an average calorific value? So something like 0.37 m³ had been recorded in the half-hour from 07:00 to 07:30? Is that likely? Or even possible?

I’m not sure just what figure they use for the volume to kWhconversion initially, but it must be an average CV at least to start with and then gets corrected later when the actual CV is known. (Borne out by posts of user puzzlement at usage figures changing days later).

As we are in summer then if the gas heating is still on, but off at the timer overnight then a spike in gas use first thing in the morning and maybe another in the evening as things cool again could be expected.

My own gas heating is on timer to come on at 07:00 and off at 22:00, but it isn’t doing much at all because its summer.

This may be a good example of 2-gas spikes from last Saturday.
You can see the spike at 07:00 as the boiler timer comes on in the morning and the gas CH fires up to take away the overnight chill.
Then there’s another spike at around 19:00 so maybe the boiler fired again as the day was cooling?
Although TBH it looks to me more like I had a shower across the half hour change starting just before 19:00, (I’ll use just over 3kWh of gas for a longish shower).and then the lower usage just after that is me cooking and then washing the dishes.

You can actually see it all better with the online account on a bigger screen.
(Note to self, next time you’re in the app try turning the phone sideways).

Just as a contrast to the above this is from March when it was colder outside so the boiler/heating was on and off all day to keep the indoor temperature at 19-20 C.

The extra tall spike at 15:30 would be due to shower, yes I often shower mid-afternoon (and then go to the pub).

PS. I’ve worked out that, for me at least, having the heating off overnight and that initial spike at 07:00 cost less than leaving the heating running all night.

Hi,

so to clear things up, it is definitely the gas that causes the spike (added a pic of our gas as well, highlighted is the 1hr30its on in evenings to heat the water tank). We don’t have a combi boiler, just water tank heated by gas and I’ve looked up the timer is 30min at 7am

1hr30 at 5.30pm… 

Definitely not heating coming on, we’ve turned this off completely for the summer. 
 

looking at solely electricity it looks like we must have signal issues some days (when we get hours with no usage) but on a day it does work, looks more like this. 

but I sat and actually looked back over July electricity data, the free hours that I’d put into my calender, which was 7hours. But based on the data that equaled just over 2kw @22.23kwh unit rate so 44.5p, so the July bill is incorrect as that was  credit 0.8p from beyond- 2hours free electricity.

let’s see if it’s more accurate for August. There was nothing in June but that was the first month we had a smart meter, so perhaps the 2hours we had selected from the options in the last week of June, just hadn’t had the chance to register in the systems.