On Feb 5, 8:17 pm, Owain wrote:
viv wrote:
I'm being as frugal as I can be, yet my gas bill from Powergen for
last quarter was over £110. This seems really excessive.

My bill for the last quarter was between £40-50 with EDF. I'm not
generous with the CH, but I do have hot water every day and the gas fire
on quite a lot.

So it could be the 2.83 conversion factor mentioned by Andy Wade.

Owain


Thanks to everyone here for their advice so far (though some of it is
a bit technical for me, as I'm not a DIY-er). I'm not doing this post
from home, as I'm not on-line, so I can't answer questions about which
boiler, meter, etc, just now, but I will give a bit more info to
clarify matters.

As to the size of my home, it's a very modern ground-floor council
flat, so the rooms are fairly small. Also, I never have the heating on
in the kichen, and very rarely in the bathroom. That leaves just three
radiators:bedroom, living-room and hallway. My flat also has double
glazing throughout.

I live by myself, so the only time the heating's on is when I turn it
on. And as I said earlier, the only hot water I use is what has been
heated through having the C/H on.

Someone here remarked that 0.5 cubic meters isn't really that much,
which makes me wonder if somehow I'm being charged wrongly. I say this
because last year I monitored how much the meter changed through a
quarter. It was something like 8 cubic meters (it might have been
more, but it certainly wasn't very much - even the meter reader
remarked to me "it's hardly gone round at all since your last
reading"). So naturally, I expected a tiny bill, and was shocked when
it turned out to be £84. I phoned the company, and was told that I had
to multiply the cubic meters by about three or four factors to get the
kwh result, which is what they were billing me for. I seem to remember
that this calculation bumped up the cubic meters figure up by a factor
of 39, and when I'd done this, the bill of £84 turned out to be
correct. But I'd still hardly used my heating at all! I used a pocket
calculator to do the calculation, and checked it three times.

I just get the feeling I may be being charged wrongly somehow.