Lee wrote:

On 28/02/2013 21:59, Andy Champ wrote:

TBH a kW standing load seems a bit high too...

1kW standing load here too, it's surprising how quickly multiple small
loads add up.

320W here right now, with fridge/freezer not actively running (think it
tends to be a 1:3 duty cycle).

A quick run around, turning "unnecessary" stuff off, only dropped it to
290W, most of which is likely to find itself being left on again inside
a week, for the £30/year it'd save.

I know if I turned the server off the rest would drop to just North of
100W for the UPS, PDU, ADSL router, WiFi AP, DECT base-station, Ethernet
switch, TV loft amp, clocks on ovens, emergency lighting chargers, PIR
detectors, phone charger and not forgetting the energy monitor!

Lee wrote:

On 01/03/2013 09:48, Andy Burns wrote:

11.26p/unit here, less approx 10% discount, plus 5% VAT = 10.6p/unit

12.07p/unit here + £15 s/charge, despite "competition" it does still
vary by area, it seems.

Ebico, who are not the cheapest, but they do at least have a flat and
understandable tariff, show the regional variations on their map

http://ebico.org.uk/products-and-pri...uipower-prices

On 01/03/2013 10:51, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Andy Burns wrote:
Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

Arfa Daily wrote:

"After thawing overnight in a fridge (below 5 deg C) : heat in a fan
assisted / gas oven for 20 minutes at 170 deg C / gas mark 3"

That sounds about right. I have a Neff double oven - both fan assisted
- and the smaller one I'd use for this would take about 10 minutes to
heat up.

My Neff single fan oven claims no (or was it less?) need to pre-heat.

Heating instructions sometime give two figures - one for fan assisted
ovens, one for not.

When heating food I'd rather it was properly heated, rather than worry
about the cost of the electricity. Heating the entire thing through to
above a certain temperature kills of bacteria.

In which case you need to check the interior of the pie rather than a
time. Putting a pie into an already-hot oven could lead to the outside
browning and looking thoroughly heated while the interior is still not
heated through. Especially if the pie is nicely cold from refrigerator.
So it is arguable that putting it into a non-pre-heated oven might be
more reliable? Double-checked with temperature probe.

--
Rod

On 2013-02-28, Peter Kemp wrote:

Thanks for the thoughts so far:

1 I agree a standing load of 1Kw is kinda high and needs investigating.
The issue with the cooker became my first priority.

2 When I quoted kilowatt hours, I was assuming that the meter's units
were kwH. Is that not the case?

3 The oven was on for fifteen minutes in total. It's a fan-assisted
oven, so it gets to working temperature pretty quickly. When turned off,
the fan continues to run for about five minutes, but I've assumed that's
trivial consumption.


We have a fairly new (last summer) fan-assisted oven connected through
a plug. It draws 2.5 to 2.8 kW when switched on, then drops back
quite a bit, occasionally going back up (especially after the door's
been open).

(I really like this oven, too. It has nice features like
automatically switching the internal fan off when the door is open to
conserve heat a little.)

RJH wrote:

On 01/03/2013 09:38, Dave Liquorice wrote:

18p is expensive though, our other supply (that gets most use) is
9.04p/unit.

I did change mine recently, and as a low user 18p-ish was the best I
could do.

Is that with standing charges payable on a daily basis, or bundled into
the inflated cost of the first howevermany units, then dropping to a
lower price for subsequent units?

When you say "low user", as various people have mentioned, 1kW isn't
low, my background usage is around 300W, with the peaks added on my
annual usage is 3.7MWh, yours would be 8.7MWh plus the peaks, so you'd
probably be looking at a grand a year for electricity, presumably your
actual bill is not in that ballpark?

Adam Funk wrote in
:

On 2013-02-28, Peter Kemp wrote:

Thanks for the thoughts so far:

1 I agree a standing load of 1Kw is kinda high and needs
investigating. The issue with the cooker became my first priority.

2 When I quoted kilowatt hours, I was assuming that the meter's
units were kwH. Is that not the case?

3 The oven was on for fifteen minutes in total. It's a fan-assisted
oven, so it gets to working temperature pretty quickly. When turned
off, the fan continues to run for about five minutes, but I've
assumed that's trivial consumption.


We have a fairly new (last summer) fan-assisted oven connected through
a plug. It draws 2.5 to 2.8 kW when switched on, then drops back
quite a bit, occasionally going back up (especially after the door's
been open).

(I really like this oven, too. It has nice features like
automatically switching the internal fan off when the door is open to
conserve heat a little.)


I remember once reading of someone who switched the oven off at the main
switch after they had used the oven as a fan kept running! Eventually the
conrols suffered from the heat.

On 01/03/2013 11:34, Andy Burns wrote:

320W here right now, with fridge/freezer not actively running (think it
tends to be a 1:3 duty cycle).

In terms of background use, the FF is the biggest culprit for us (it's
old and worse we like it cold, @2C), followed by a pair of SkyHD boxes
and then the usual complement of NAS,modem,router etc...


Lee

Andy Burns wrote:

yours would be 8.7MWh plus the peaks, so you'd
probably be looking at a grand a year for electricity

Make that a grand and a half, if you're paying 18p/unit rather than
12p/unit ...

Thanks for the suggestions about the meter.

I should have said:

a) it's one of those new-fangled electronic meters with an LCD readout.
No decimal point.

b) as I press the blue button, it cycles between the four readings
(Night, day, Evenings/weekends, Heating)

c) the meter specifically says "kwHr". And the numeric reading is the
one on the bill, charged as one kwhr per unit.

As planned, we turned *everything* off at the plug before going out
shopping this morning. Even the fridge freezer.
Not too surprisingly, the meter reading when we returned was the same as
when we went out at 8192
Into the house, put on a 1.8kw fan heater fire. Absolutely nothing else,
not a lightbulb, not even the kettle.

Here are the results:

09:25 8192
10:56 8192
11:16 8194
11:20 8195 I watched it flip from 8194 to 8195 at 11:20
11:30 8196 I watched it flip from 8195 to 8196 at 11:30


Six kilowatts per hour!

So I call EDF. "Hmm. Perhaps your appliance is faulty."

Short conversation along the lines of 6kw = 24 amps or so, with
appliance having 13A fuse.

Their "Customer Care Team" will call next week with a test device. Let's
hope they bring along a calibrated resistive load so we can agree what
the consumption *should* be...


Regards
Peter

On Friday, March 1, 2013 12:37:30 PM UTC, Peter Kemp wrote:

Their "Customer Care Team" will call next week with a test device.

I'm looking forward to the outcome of this one!

Let's hope they bring along a calibrated resistive load so we can agree
what the consumption *should* be...

I reckon that given your meter seems to be out by a factor of three you should be alright even if they don't, particularly as it is surely likely to be a high-current device in order to get a reading without waiting around too long.

Mathew

On Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:44:05 +0000, Andy Burns
wrote:

Lee wrote:

On 01/03/2013 09:48, Andy Burns wrote:

11.26p/unit here, less approx 10% discount, plus 5% VAT = 10.6p/unit

12.07p/unit here + £15 s/charge, despite "competition" it does still
vary by area, it seems.

Ebico, who are not the cheapest, but they do at least have a flat and
understandable tariff, show the regional variations on their map

http://ebico.org.uk/products-and-pri...uipower-prices

Presumably you're on an old tariff. It looks as if the range is about
15.6-17.6 p.p.u. at the moment.

On 28/02/2013 21:40, Peter Kemp wrote:
Folks,

We've recently moved and I've finally got around to checking the flat's
energy consumption.

So I start this morning:

08:00 'day' meter reading 8159
09:00 'day' meter reading 8160
10:00 'day' meter reading 8161
11:00 'day' meter reading 8162 OK, one unit or so an hour
12:00 'day' meter reading 8166 What???
13:00 'day' meter reading 8167 Back to one unit an hour

What happened between 11:00 and 12:00? My wife put the fan oven on for
15 minutes, to heat up a pie. That's right - 15 minutes. Nothing else in
the flat changed during that time.

How can a fan oven consume 3 kw hours in fifteen minutes? It's a
run-of-the-mill single Bosch fan oven - that's a 3 or 4kw load rating?

It seems unlikely. If it is a smart modern one it is limited to at most
3kW peak when warming up and will quickly drop back to short bursts to
maintain oven temperature when you open the oven door.

To my understanding, the figures suggest the oven was running at 12 kw
for that quarter of an hour (some 48 amps) which doesn't seem plausible.

My first thought is that the meter is faulty, but I'd like to know of
other possibilities.

Can anyone offer enlightenment?

Your base load looks alarmingly high unless you have electric lights and
many random appliances on continuously all over the place.

Under 100W average base load is more normal as a quick and dirty rule of
thumb. I'd hazard a guess that spike was an oven plus one or two
electric cooker rings or some other hungry appliance like a toaster.
Even the kettle can't explain it - runs at 3kW but only for 3-4 mins.

P.S. This wasn't a fluke. Mid-afternoon, I ran the oven for another 15
minutes and whoosh, another four units gone over the hour (ie the base
load plus three).

Simplest thing is get one of the OWL clip on meters that shows your
actual current consumption in Amps or kW in real time. You can expect to
save around 10% off your electricity bill even if you are already frugal
- which with a base load that is 10x the norm you are not.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?ie=UTF8&k...3xxs7 7gide_b

Some electricity companies will give you one on the right tariff.

To isolate the badly behaved appliances (suspect TV, video, hifi first)
you will need one of the plug in power monitors that checks the
performance of device on a 13A plug.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

On 01/03/2013 11:55, Andy Burns wrote:
RJH wrote:

On 01/03/2013 09:38, Dave Liquorice wrote:

18p is expensive though, our other supply (that gets most use) is
9.04p/unit.

I did change mine recently, and as a low user 18p-ish was the best I
could do.

Is that with standing charges payable on a daily basis, or bundled into
the inflated cost of the first howevermany units, then dropping to a
lower price for subsequent units?

When you say "low user", as various people have mentioned, 1kW isn't
low, my background usage is around 300W, with the peaks added on my
annual usage is 3.7MWh, yours would be 8.7MWh plus the peaks, so you'd
probably be looking at a grand a year for electricity, presumably your
actual bill is not in that ballpark?

Base load with the house lights off should be around 100W or less.
Easily acheived once you have some feedback from a realtime monitor. I
found various wall warts for long since defunct modems warming up the
back of desks when I audited my own home for electricity usage.

Mine would be lower still if I allowed the router to drop offline when
idle and disabled the emergency lights and burglar alarm. Each of these
represents a continuous 10-15W load (as does my host of PCs in standby).

It is really hard to go below 50W minimum base load without switching
everything off at the wall which is a real PITA since so many things
like cookers require their clocks to be set before they will work...

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

Martin Brown wrote:

Base load with the house lights off should be around 100W or less.
Easily acheived once you have some feedback from a realtime monitor.

I can achieve that, but choose not to.

It is really hard to go below 50W minimum base load

You can say that again.

In article ,
polygonum wrote:
When heating food I'd rather it was properly heated, rather than worry
about the cost of the electricity. Heating the entire thing through to
above a certain temperature kills of bacteria.

In which case you need to check the interior of the pie rather than a
time. Putting a pie into an already-hot oven could lead to the outside
browning and looking thoroughly heated while the interior is still not
heated through.

If the oven is too hot, possibly yes. Although I've never known this.

Especially if the pie is nicely cold from refrigerator.
So it is arguable that putting it into a non-pre-heated oven might be
more reliable? Double-checked with temperature probe.

I'd assume the heating instructions on the item are designed to heat it
through correctly. But all the ones I've seen say 'place in a pre-heated
oven', since they ain't going to know how long it takes an individual oven
to heat up.

--
*Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of cheques *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Bill Taylor wrote:

Presumably you're on an old tariff. It looks as if the range is about
15.6-17.6 p.p.u. at the moment.

I'm with e.On rather than Ebico just using them for illustration, I
changed tariff in mid-December to a 12 month discount with tie-in (only
£5 per fuel to leave them).

On Fri, 01 Mar 2013 13:38:30 +0000, Bill Taylor wrote:

On Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:44:05 +0000, Andy Burns
wrote:

Lee wrote:

On 01/03/2013 09:48, Andy Burns wrote:

11.26p/unit here, less approx 10% discount, plus 5% VAT = 10.6p/unit

12.07p/unit here + £15 s/charge, despite "competition" it does still
vary by area, it seems.

Ebico, who are not the cheapest, but they do at least have a flat and
understandable tariff, show the regional variations on their map

http://ebico.org.uk/products-and-pri...uipower-prices

Presumably you're on an old tariff. It looks as if the range is about
15.6-17.6 p.p.u. at the moment.

I'm with OVO, currently 10.27p/kWh + VAT + standing charge, effectively that's 12.3 p/unit.



--
Terry Fields

On 01/03/2013 11:55, Andy Burns wrote:
RJH wrote:

On 01/03/2013 09:38, Dave Liquorice wrote:

18p is expensive though, our other supply (that gets most use) is
9.04p/unit.

I did change mine recently, and as a low user 18p-ish was the best I
could do.

Is that with standing charges payable on a daily basis, or bundled into
the inflated cost of the first howevermany units, then dropping to a
lower price for subsequent units?


With standing charge (25p/day) and on a standard tariff - 12.2p/unit. I
use about 200 units/quarter, coming in at 18pish including standing charge.

When you say "low user", as various people have mentioned, 1kW isn't
low, my background usage is around 300W, with the peaks added on my
annual usage is 3.7MWh, yours would be 8.7MWh plus the peaks, so you'd
probably be looking at a grand a year for electricity, presumably your
actual bill is not in that ballpark?


No, *I'm* a low user by comparison! About £200 pa. But that's as much to
do with my domestic arrangements (away quite a bit) as parsimony and
careful use.

Rob

On Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:14:47 +0000, RJH wrote:

18p is expensive though, our other supply (that gets most use) is
9.04p/unit.

I did change mine recently, and as a low user 18p-ish was the best I
could do. Who is your supplier?

9.04p/unit is N-Power "Go-Fix 11", standing charge(*), pay by fixed
monthly direct debit and paperless. Remember that prices vary from the
same supplier with the same tariff depending on which region you are in.

If you really are a low user, ie struggle to use all of a Tier 1 amount
of power, have a look at Equipower. That is 14.08p/unit flate rate (might
vary due to region), no standing charge of any sort.

(*) 39.9p/day but if you always use more than the Tier 1 amount on the so
called "no standing charge" tariffs in makes sod all difference. As the
Tier 2 rate is the same as the standing charge rate (for the same
tariff).

--
Cheers
Dave.

Peter Kemp explained on 28/02/2013 :
Thanks for the thoughts so far:

1 I agree a standing load of 1Kw is kinda high and needs investigating.
The issue with the cooker became my first priority.

2 When I quoted kilowatt hours, I was assuming that the meter's units
were kwH. Is that not the case?

3 The oven was on for fifteen minutes in total. It's a fan-assisted
oven, so it gets to working temperature pretty quickly. When turned off,
the fan continues to run for about five minutes, but I've assumed that's
trivial consumption.



We're going to shut down the house completely tomorrow (apart from the
fridge) before going out shopping for a couple of hours. I don't expect
the meter to budge.
When we get back, the oven goes on for fifteen minutes while I stand and
watch the meter. If another three units go up in smoke during that time,
I guess it's a phone call to EDF.

Wish me luck!


Regards
Peter

With no decimal point, the three, could be just over one. If you switch
on just before the number is about to click over and switch off, just
after it has clicked over, your 3Kw might actually be no more than 1002
watt / hour.

--
Regards,
Harry (M1BYT) (L)
http://www.ukradioamateur.co.uk

RJH wrote:

On 01/03/2013 11:55, Andy Burns wrote:

Is that with standing charges payable on a daily basis, or bundled in


With standing charge (25p/day) and on a standard tariff - 12.2p/unit. I
use about 200 units/quarter, coming in at 18pish including standing charge.

Ah if you're spreading the standing charge over a lowish number of
units, then it will tend to bump up the apparent rate per unit.

No, *I'm* a low user by comparison! About £200 pa.

yeah, that's quite light.

On Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:20:47 +0000, Andy Burns wrote:

Ah if you're spreading the standing charge over a lowish number of
units, then it will tend to bump up the apparent rate per unit.

And be very confusing unless *all* the details are provided.

No, *I'm* a low user by comparison! About £200 pa.

yeah, that's quite light.

Miniscule... using so little that a few p/unit isn't worth worrying
about. Switching to Equipower to get rid of the standing charge is
probably worth while.

--
Cheers
Dave.

On 2013-03-01, DerbyBorn wrote:

Adam Funk wrote in
:

We have a fairly new (last summer) fan-assisted oven connected through
a plug. It draws 2.5 to 2.8 kW when switched on, then drops back
quite a bit, occasionally going back up (especially after the door's
been open).

(I really like this oven, too. It has nice features like
automatically switching the internal fan off when the door is open to
conserve heat a little.)


I remember once reading of someone who switched the oven off at the main
switch after they had used the oven as a fan kept running! Eventually the
conrols suffered from the heat.

That would have been OK with the old one. When you switched it off,
it stopped doing anything (except running the clock, of course). The
new one (I guess this is standard now) has an external fan that runs
for a while, as you say. We've become able to tell from the knob
position at a distance that it's off.

Mathew Newton wrote:

On Friday, March 1, 2013 12:37:30 PM UTC, Peter Kemp wrote:

Their "Customer Care Team" will call next week with a test device.

I'm looking forward to the outcome of this one!

Me too!

Let's hope they bring along a calibrated resistive load so we can agree
what the consumption *should* be...

I reckon that given your meter seems to be out by a factor of three you should be alright even if they don't, particularly as it is surely likely to be a high-current device in order to get a reading without waiting around too long.

They could also do a quick check with a clamp-on ammeter, which
would easily verify that the connected load is roughly what it is
expected to be.

Chris
--
Chris J Dixon Nottingham UK


Plant amazing Acers.

On Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:37:30 +0000, Peter Kemp
wrote:

a) it's one of those new-fangled electronic meters with an LCD readout.
No decimal point.

Those meters usually have one or two flashing LED lights, one will
flash once per watt used. If no current is being used they stay on
constantly.

On Feb 28, 9:40*pm, Peter Kemp wrote:
Folks,

We've recently moved and I've finally got around to checking the flat's
energy consumption.

So I start this morning:

08:00 'day' meter reading 8159
09:00 'day' meter reading 8160
10:00 'day' meter reading 8161
11:00 'day' meter reading 8162 * * *OK, one unit or so an hour
12:00 'day' meter reading 8166 * * *What???
13:00 'day' meter reading 8167 * * *Back to one unit an hour

What happened between 11:00 and 12:00? My wife put the fan oven on for
15 minutes, to heat up a pie. That's right - 15 minutes. Nothing else in
the flat changed during that time.

How can a fan oven consume 3 kw hours in fifteen minutes? It's a
run-of-the-mill single Bosch fan oven - that's a 3 or 4kw load rating?

To my understanding, the figures suggest the oven was running at 12 kw
for that quarter of an hour (some 48 amps) which doesn't seem plausible.

My first thought is that the meter is faulty, but I'd like to know of
other possibilities.

Can anyone offer enlightenment?

Many thanks,
Peter

P.S. This wasn't a fluke. Mid-afternoon, I ran the oven for another 15
minutes and whoosh, another four units gone over the hour (ie the base
load plus three).

I think you have shifted a decimal place here.

The last figure on electronic meters is tenths.

BTW, you can also count the flashing light.
1000 flashes per KWh.

If it's a spinning disk meter it may have tenths and hundredths of a
KWh shown.

On 01/03/2013 18:09, Peter Parry wrote:
On Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:37:30 +0000, Peter Kemp
wrote:

a) it's one of those new-fangled electronic meters with an LCD readout.
No decimal point.

Those meters usually have one or two flashing LED lights, one will
flash once per watt used. If no current is being used they stay on
constantly.

I think the flash rate varies with the meter make & model, as did the
revs/kWh of the old spinning discs.

The number of flashes per kWh will be marked on the meter. Mine says
1000 flashes per kWh - so counting the number of flashes in a minute and
multiplying by 60 will give the load in watts, averaged over that
minute. YMMV.

BTW it is EDF that the OP needs to phone, if that's his supplier, not
UKPN. For metering queries you need your supplier, not the DNO.

--
Andy

"Tim Watts" wrote in message
...
On Friday 01 March 2013 08:56 Rod Speed wrote in uk.d-i-y:



"Dave Liquorice" wrote in message
ll.co.uk...
On Fri, 1 Mar 2013 02:44:05 -0000, Arfa Daily wrote:

You can heat a pie in a conventional fan oven in 15 minutes from cold?

Reading from the Pukka-Pies box that I just happened to have laying
around in the kitchen :

"After thawing overnight in a fridge (below 5 deg C) : heat in a fan
assisted / gas oven for 20 minutes at 170 deg C / gas mark 3"

Oven from cold with pie in or oven pre-heated then pie in? All the oven
based cooking instructions I can remember all have pre-heated in them.

I just ignore that instruction, essentially because the oven
heats up so quickly it makes no practical difference.

I disagree. Mine has a "fast heatup mode" but even that takes 5-10 minutes
to signal it is ready (target temps between 160C and 250C).

The point tho is that it makes little difference to the time to
heat the pie that the surroundings of the pie arent at the
preheat temp to start with. The most you might need is
a marginally longer time with the pie actually in the oven
but that's less effort than waiting until the oven is up to
temp before putting the pie in it.

It wont even necessarily see the total electricity
consumed by the oven significantly different.

If you are going to put it all in from cold, I usually add 5 mins

Hardly the end of civilisation as we know it...

- even if the full heatup takes 10 minutes, the food has had 5 minutes
extra
drawing some heat so you can knock a bit off the full temperature time.

IMO the convenience of turning the oven on, putting the
cold pie in the oven at the same time is worth it. Why fart
around waiting for the oven to get up to temp before
putting the pie in the oven as a separate operation ?

And I am almost always taking the pie from the freezer
to the oven, so it makes even less difference in that case.

I don't do it with pizzas tho, I do preheat the oven for
those, but that's because I get the oven stinking hot,
quite literally flat out, no thermostat action at all,
giving it a full 30 mins to get that hot, and the pizza
is only in the oven for 5 mins, and I am getting the
salad ready that goes with it and keeping an eye on
the pizza because the time in the oven is very critical,
it goes from not long enough to too long very quickly
at those temps. Gives a perfect very crisp thin pizza
when done right tho.

"Dave Liquorice" wrote in message
ll.co.uk...
On Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:38:47 +0000, RJH wrote:

1 kWh ambient is a lot, especially if it doesn't include heating.
That's £1500 a year on its own. I'd look at your method of
measurement first.

How do you arrive at that amount ?

Doing the maths backwards 17p/unit. Which is perfectly possible to
have these days even with a "standard" tarrif. Our E7 day rate is
18.78 + 5% VAT...

Yes - I used 18p, but the tariff system is confusing in the sense
you're never comparing like with like.

Tariffs are confusing but the various comparison sites tidy that up a bit
but you still need to look at the actual unit prices and you actual
useage rather than take their "savings" figures.

18p is expensive though, our other supply (that gets most use) is
9.04p/unit.

1KWh background (that is, at night say) - 2 old freezers and larder
fridge, one old PC 24/7, 3 or 4 20W standby appliances (phones,
printer)?

1kW at night with everyone asleep would be high but
is reasonable for when people are up and about.

Not here its not. In summer there is very little difference in
the power use between everyone asleep and everyone up
even tho I am always up before the sun.

Not much difference in winter either. I have
an electric blanket on when sleeping and the
equivalent on the armchair when not sleeping.

The only extra power is the toaster for breakfast,
I don't even other with hot coffee or tea anymore,
just drink tap water or beer and never have beer
for breakfast.

The most I ever have between breakfast and dinner at
night is a piece of fruit or two, so no power there either.

Even dinner is only 30 mins of intermittent power at
most except with a roast in which case its much longer.

Even with showers, the hot water is off peak
electric storage so that is heated when sleeping.

I don't heat the house at all, its passive solar.

The times the OP mentioned and produced the 1kW/hr base
load were when he and his missues where up and about...

Mine is nothing like that.

I must investigate our 300W night load as it's pretty steady for hours.

My PC is on 24/7, but only one now that its got enough
horsepower so that I don't have a separate PVR anymore.

Lots of other stuff is on 24/7 like the laptop charger etc.

Nothing like 300W baseload consumption.

I don't see 50 - 100W steps that I would expect from fridges/freezers
cutting in and out. They are all A class though so perhaps they don't
actualy come on all that often in the wee small hours.

I have one large modern frost free fridge and a couple of
bar fridge sized freezers under the main kitchen bench.

"Tim Watts" wrote in message
...
On Friday 01 March 2013 09:07 AC wrote in uk.d-i-y:


Phone EDF? Brave man.



UK Power round here now...

Phoning them is a waste of time for a full village outage:

I do it occasionally like in the winter evening when it might
be going to take a while to fix because we have just had a
big storm go thru and I'm deciding whether to just go to bed
or read an ebook on the laptop waiting for it to come back.

Or if it goes out in the morning for no obvious reason like a
storm, to know if its better to read a book or an ebook on
the laptop or more productive to go out and about because
they are changing a pole down the street and the rest of
town is fine etc so the shops will be working fine.

Ours does have a pretty decent system for recorded messages
giving what areas are affected and how long its likely down for etc.

1) It's the main substation and that is monitored to buggery - it has
auxillary pole transformers for its own power on *both* sets of 33/66kV
incomers (I know not the exact voltage) and it has a sat dish or two.
Unless that's so the bloke can watch Sky while boiling a brew,
I'm pretty sure it signifies a high level of automation

2) Even when 1 applies, the phone staff are never upto date. They'll write
it down, but is a waste of time as the van usually arrives in a few
minutes
anyway and you have to follow the script: "Have your checked your CU? Is
anyone else without power...?"

If it was just a road or two out, then I'd ring them (because
everybody else assumes somebody *else* did it).

I used to do that but never found I was the only
one to tell them, so don't bother anymore.

Yes, if everyone did that, it wouldn't work, but everyone doesn't.

What I do wish they had was a web page + twitter feed that said "yes
we know, Robertsbridge has flipped its lid again, van's on the way"...

Our recording on the phone number does that.

More useful for most.

"RJH" wrote in message
...
On 01/03/2013 11:55, Andy Burns wrote:
RJH wrote:

On 01/03/2013 09:38, Dave Liquorice wrote:

18p is expensive though, our other supply (that gets most use) is
9.04p/unit.

I did change mine recently, and as a low user 18p-ish was the best I
could do.

Is that with standing charges payable on a daily basis, or bundled into
the inflated cost of the first howevermany units, then dropping to a
lower price for subsequent units?


With standing charge (25p/day) and on a standard tariff - 12.2p/unit. I
use about 200 units/quarter, coming in at 18pish including standing
charge.

Blimey !! I use 200 units a week !

Arfa



When you say "low user", as various people have mentioned, 1kW isn't
low, my background usage is around 300W, with the peaks added on my
annual usage is 3.7MWh, yours would be 8.7MWh plus the peaks, so you'd
probably be looking at a grand a year for electricity, presumably your
actual bill is not in that ballpark?


No, *I'm* a low user by comparison! About £200 pa. But that's as much to
do with my domestic arrangements (away quite a bit) as parsimony and
careful use.

Rob

"Dave Liquorice" wrote in message
ll.co.uk...
On Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:20:47 +0000, Andy Burns wrote:

Ah if you're spreading the standing charge over a lowish number of
units, then it will tend to bump up the apparent rate per unit.

And be very confusing unless *all* the details are provided.

No, *I'm* a low user by comparison! About £200 pa.

yeah, that's quite light.

Miniscule... using so little that a few p/unit isn't worth worrying
about. Switching to Equipower to get rid of the standing charge is
probably worth while.

--
Cheers
Dave.


Sounds like a prime candidate to get Harry round to check him out for one of
those black sail thingies on his roof ... :-)

Arfa

snip

I think you have shifted a decimal place here.

The last figure on electronic meters is tenths.

It isn't on mine, replaced about 2 years ago ...

Arfa

On Sat, 02 Mar 2013 02:19:49 +0000, Arfa Daily wrote:

"RJH" wrote in message
...
On 01/03/2013 11:55, Andy Burns wrote:
RJH wrote:

On 01/03/2013 09:38, Dave Liquorice wrote:

18p is expensive though, our other supply (that gets most use) is
9.04p/unit.

I did change mine recently, and as a low user 18p-ish was the best I
could do.

Is that with standing charges payable on a daily basis, or bundled
into the inflated cost of the first howevermany units, then dropping
to a lower price for subsequent units?


With standing charge (25p/day) and on a standard tariff - 12.2p/unit. I
use about 200 units/quarter, coming in at 18pish including standing
charge.

Blimey !! I use 200 units a week !

Arfa



When you say "low user", as various people have mentioned, 1kW isn't
low, my background usage is around 300W, with the peaks added on my
annual usage is 3.7MWh, yours would be 8.7MWh plus the peaks, so you'd
probably be looking at a grand a year for electricity, presumably your
actual bill is not in that ballpark?


No, *I'm* a low user by comparison! About £200 pa. But that's as much
to do with my domestic arrangements (away quite a bit) as parsimony and
careful use.

Rob



Same here. Just reda the meter - 850 units in the last 28 days...


--
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK: http://www.mirrorservice.org
My posts (including this one) are my copyright and if @diy_forums on
Twitter wish to tweet them they can pay me £30 a post
*lightning surge protection* - a w_tom conductor

On Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:20:31 +0000, Dave Liquorice wrote:

On Fri, 1 Mar 2013 02:44:05 -0000, Arfa Daily wrote:

You can heat a pie in a conventional fan oven in 15 minutes from cold?

Reading from the Pukka-Pies box that I just happened to have laying
around in the kitchen :

"After thawing overnight in a fridge (below 5 deg C) : heat in a fan
assisted / gas oven for 20 minutes at 170 deg C / gas mark 3"

Oven from cold with pie in or oven pre-heated then pie in? All the oven
based cooking instructions I can remember all have pre-heated in them.

The problem with pre-heat or not depends on the thermal properties of the food.

Once upon a time I used to carry out physical tests at elevated temperatures on special materials. The oven
supplier for the testing machine provided a handbook, which suggested one of three heating heating regimes
depending on the thermal properties of the material being tested. Regrettably I can't now recall what the
properties were, but the results fell into one of three categories that played the greatest part in heating the
specimens (partly dependent on their dimensions): convection, radiation, or a combination of both. The idea was
to ensure that the specimens equilibrated at the elevated temperature in the shortest time, due to degredation.

Cooking a pie is rather similar, the radiative effect might play a significant part on the food-heating process.
However, radiant heat is dependent on the fourth power of the temperature, so essentially the maximum benefit
will be gained when the oven has reached the cooking temperature recommended for that product, with not
much contribution up to that point. So putting a pie in a cold oven and turning on, might result in much less
radiative flux reaching the food, and so the product could be undercooked.

For an oven that reaches temperature in a very few minutes this might not matter much for a product that takes
say 10 times that interval to cook properly, but 15 minutes in an oven that takes 5 minutes to heat could make a
significant difference.

--
Terry Fields

On Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:21:38 -0800, harry wrote:


BTW, you can also count the flashing light.
1000 flashes per KWh.

Mine flashes at the rate of 3200 per kWh, so one per second would be equivalent to 9/8 kW, a very useful factor
(not) to use when standing in the cold trying to estimate the power draw. When I was given a monitor, it made
things so much easier....

--
Terry Fields

Bob Eager wrote:

Arfa Daily wrote:

"RJH" wrote:

I use about 200 units/quarter

Blimey !! I use 200 units a week !

Same here. Just reda the meter - 850 units in the last 28 days...

397 units last month.

On 02/03/2013 10:01, Terry Fields wrote:
On Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:20:31 +0000, Dave Liquorice wrote:

On Fri, 1 Mar 2013 02:44:05 -0000, Arfa Daily wrote:

You can heat a pie in a conventional fan oven in 15 minutes from cold?

Reading from the Pukka-Pies box that I just happened to have laying
around in the kitchen :

"After thawing overnight in a fridge (below 5 deg C) : heat in a fan
assisted / gas oven for 20 minutes at 170 deg C / gas mark 3"

Oven from cold with pie in or oven pre-heated then pie in? All the oven
based cooking instructions I can remember all have pre-heated in them.

The problem with pre-heat or not depends on the thermal properties of the food.

Once upon a time I used to carry out physical tests at elevated temperatures on special materials. The oven
supplier for the testing machine provided a handbook, which suggested one of three heating heating regimes
depending on the thermal properties of the material being tested. Regrettably I can't now recall what the
properties were, but the results fell into one of three categories that played the greatest part in heating the
specimens (partly dependent on their dimensions): convection, radiation, or a combination of both. The idea was
to ensure that the specimens equilibrated at the elevated temperature in the shortest time, due to degredation.

Cooking a pie is rather similar, the radiative effect might play a significant part on the food-heating process.
However, radiant heat is dependent on the fourth power of the temperature, so essentially the maximum benefit
will be gained when the oven has reached the cooking temperature recommended for that product, with not
much contribution up to that point. So putting a pie in a cold oven and turning on, might result in much less
radiative flux reaching the food, and so the product could be undercooked.

For an oven that reaches temperature in a very few minutes this might not matter much for a product that takes
say 10 times that interval to cook properly, but 15 minutes in an oven that takes 5 minutes to heat could make a
significant difference.

Makes sense. But putting a pie with a cold centre into an oven with high
radiant heat (i.e. full pre-heated) can cause the pastry to brown and
even burn before it has fully heated through. Hence, in my book, bung it
in a cold oven, and take it out when centre is hot PLUS aesthetically
browned to desirable point. Even if that takes longer than the packet
says. But that does need a thermometer or other means of checking pie
interior temperature. I believe that in many cases that might reduce
overall fuel consumption. Probably not all cases and possibly by a very
slim margin.

It also matters what the pie is placed on in the oven.

--
Rod

In article ,
polygonum wrote:
Makes sense. But putting a pie with a cold centre into an oven with high
radiant heat (i.e. full pre-heated) can cause the pastry to brown and
even burn before it has fully heated through.

How much radiant heat in a fan assisted oven at about 190C?

--
*If God dropped acid, would he see people?

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

On Sat, 02 Mar 2013 13:44:39 +0000, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

In article ,
polygonum wrote:
Makes sense. But putting a pie with a cold centre into an oven with
high radiant heat (i.e. full pre-heated) can cause the pastry to brown
and even burn before it has fully heated through.

How much radiant heat in a fan assisted oven at about 190C?

Quite a lot, that's why roasts like potatoes are put on the top shelf, it's nearer a radiating surface.



--
Terry Fields