@childofgod83 Yeah I’m happy it’s right, I’m quite a geek over it. It’s a big house, 4 bed detached with a 1 bed house attached where our lodger lives, basically, bills are combined for both. We don’t use our immersion heater at all, all hot water is gas.
We used 848 in 58 days so 100 in 7 is pretty much the same, no?
@little_sparrow The fact that you have a basement seems to indicate possibly an older property? In which case insulation might not be great. Have you checked windows, the loft, are the walls insulated?
Having said all this, it is likely down to the pump.
@sashieng House was built in 1890, so likely I can make some improvements here. We only moved in around 2yrs ago, and had to do a lot of renovating already so we didn't get to this yet.
@little_sparrow In which case I don't think your energy usage is likely unreasonable (especially given the pump situation).
Longer-term, if the pump has to remain, e.g. you cannot rectify the ingress of water (not ideal from a damp perspective), this might be to sort of thing where investing in solar and a battery might be a cost efficient option (maybe).
@sashieng The heating is gas not electric, so even if they had all the windows open throughout winter it shouldn’t actually increase the electricity usage
@little_sparrow So that 1195kWh is for two months, not one, which sounds pretty typical to me. We use around 530kWh electricity per month for a family of three, four bed townhouse, gas central heating, and charging our car once a week (which is by far the biggest user of electric at 50kWh for a typical charge). Getting a smart meter will certainly help you see real time when your energy is peaking.
@abim that car is 250kwh extra a month which OP doesn’t have, and still tilts them firmly towards ‘excessive’ use. Although 1200 across two months is a lot better than 1200 across one month which is what we first thought. I’d say 300-350 is perhaps more usual (about 10-12kwh per day with gas heating and gas for hot water). so that leaves 250-300 to explain away which the pump might cover?
@abim if its a pump with a 3-pin plug (don’t know if it might be hard wired) I’d definitely grab a tapo or similar smart energy monitoring plug that can report energy usage and quickly give you a clear picture what its using per day/week/month.
@reethu FYI the graphs Octopus provide are really annoying - there is one bar for each meter reading reading, so bars may represent varying amounts of time, depending on if and when you submit a reading. If you submit readings like clockwork on the same date every month they're fine, but otherwise they're pretty useless.
@reethu Ah your right, so on the newest one it says "1st Jan - 27Feb", the one before that says 29th Nov - 31st Dec, and before that its 1st Oct to 28th Nov, then 31 Aug to 30 Sep, etc
@little_sparrow So basically 1st Jan to 27 Feb is your 1200kWh consumption. Which is around 600kWh per month. It's certainly high for a gas heated home, but it's not crazy and you could attribute a chunk of that to the pump if it's a high flow rate, high head pump but I strongly suspect it's an immersion heater being the main culprit.
