ProDave

The stairs thing is not a matter of how tall you are. you must maintain 2 metres headroom througout the length of the stair flight.

In just 4 weeks it will be midsumers day and the nights will start to draw in.

I keep a weekly reading of our energy usage. I actually have 5 meter readings to take (don't ask) but it tells me exactly how much we use, how much heating and hot water use, how much we generate and how much we export. Total usage is well down from the winter. Heating use is a small fraction of our bill. Other "stuff" uses more than the heating. Now no heating is on you can see the "stuff" usage drop as as the solar PV generation goes up. MVHR and the treatment plant both use about 2KWh each per day., ASHP uses almost 1KWh per week for "heating" even when the heating is off. that is just to power it's electronics to keep it ready to turn on. That's a constant load of about 5 watts.

550 miles to be precise.

This is where you do need to keep an eye on your bills and why I hate this rolling credit / debit thing. At the beginning of the winter I noticed our monthly bill was exceeding the monthly payment so I instigated an increase to the monthly payment to prevent a large debit building up, because I did not want the supplier suddenly deciding to increase it to a silly rate to claw back the debit over a short period. As it happened I seem to have guessed the amount about right as now mid summer I am slightly in credit. I might even reduce my payment a bit now until the winter. Whatever supplier you are with you should get as monthly bill so you can see how much you are using for esch month of the year and decide yourself if the pasyment matches the billing,

A while back we had a rental flat with E7 heating. When we came to sell it and the last tenant moved out, and we sent the final readings the bill came back wrong. I soon worked out the tenenat had been transposing the day and night readings. It took months to sort out. we even had a meter reader visit twice. He took down the readings and gave us a copy of the day and night readings he gave, but as soon as they got entered, the "system" swapped them over as they were "wrong" It took a lot of complaining and aparently they had to trace 2 previous tenants as the bills had been wrong for some time. I guess if automated readings can prevent that error? but then if there IS an error I suspect it will be almost impossible to correct as "it can't be wrong"

When you can get past (ignore) the fact Octtopus's website looks like it was designed by someone in Primary School, it does actually work. I submit a reading each month and within a few seconds the bill for that month is there, and so far has been accurate. And they do allow YOU to set the level of the monthly direct debit unlike IRESA who you had to request a change and it never happened.

Hi and welcome. Abingdon is not far from where I used to live and work for a long time, until I moved a "few" miles north.

To be honest I never saw anything wrong with taking a quarterly reading and paying the whole quarters bill on one go. There was not exactly anything difficult about that for the customer or the supplier. (other than they has to wait a quarter to get paid) Now we have the silly situation that if you want anything other than the default expensive legacy billing, then you have to go to monthly readings and monthly payments. That's 4 times the work for the supplier, 4 times as many readings to process and 4 times as many bills to produce. Then add in you have to pay the same amount each month so they estimate how much you will use in a year and divide that by 12. so they have to manage an account that might be in credit or might be in debit and they might have to adjust your monthly payment. MORE work for them. And the end game is half hourly billing? I can see the admin charges (standing charge?) rising significantly to cover all this extra admin. The whole system is bonkers. If I could find someone that even took a monthly reading and then billed you in full for that month with none of this rolling credit nonsense I would.

Hi and welcome to the forum. Just be aware it is against the forum T&C to actively promote your business . I am sure we can all be of help and you will find the forum a great place to find help and advice.

Then let's have an honest debate, you have to reduce peak usage to even out demand, so peak rate metering and charging is the tool to achieve that and encourage you to change your usage patterns. Claiming anything else like it will save you money is just false advertising. I will let you know what I hear back from the ASA. Quite when all of us with electric ovens are supposed to cook our dinner if it is too expensive to do at 6PM I don't know. So it becomes a bit of an impossible energy time shift.

The finer details of the survey was not published where I found it. It was conducted by the ECN and published in an electrical contracting magazine.

I found this recent survey 7% Claim reduced bills . 9% Claim increased bills. 23% Said main reason for fitting was to reduce bills. 47% Unlikely to have SM fitted in the next 12 months. 20% Fairly unlikely. 5% Very likely. 13% Fairly likely. 61% Had no issues with SMs 45% Found no benefits from having a SM . 29% Claimed more accurate readings . Any actual saving is small and lost in the noise. I doubt many people these days are particularly wasteful of energy so have little scope for turning stuff off. I have said before, I don't dispute the need for peak rate charging and hence the need for half hourly metering, it just incenses me that they are being "sold" on a false claim of saving the planet. In fact I was so incensed I have just fired off a complaint to ASA about that advert. The first time any advert has annoyed me enough to do that.

Not normally. Most of them run at a higher temperature when doing DHW and a lower temperature for space heating (so they run at a better COP) so you would not normally do both together.

The latest smart meter advert I saw last night claiming they are an essential part of solving global warming, I believe needs investigating by the ASA. I would complain about it to them if I knew how. Why can't they be honest and say the reason for them is half hourly metering so we can be charged more at peak times of the day and that might bully us into cooking our dinner at a different time of day and save the grid from collapse.