How much is your electricity bill?

How much do you pay monthly for electricity and who is your supplier?


Do you have any tips for reducing your consumption?


I recently fitted a timer to our water heater which had taken to running constantly, this has reduced our consumption significantly but I'm wondering if there are further saving to be had by changing supplier?


if you're on d/d with EDF they always like to over estimate, then when they do the meter reading at year end, you get the final bill with a refund or demand for the balance owed..

your water heater may have a fault if it keeps tripping the cutout.. my old water heater was fine until i wanted to raise the water temp in the tank, in a attempt to give more available hot water for longer, i turned the stat a little.. and didn't think more of it until next day.. cold water!!.. the timer activated as per EDF signal, and the cut out tripped.. i reset the stat to 60 and all was fine.. i tried again some time later with the same result.. trip out.. new stats are reasonably priced, unlike the elements.. almost cheaper to install a new tank!! do you have the timer gizmo that is triggered by EDF in off peak time?.. make sure it's not set to manual/constant heat.. i'm no expert, but can't see how the external cabling can make your stat trip out.. you have power from the meter or you don't.. the stat is self governing!

if you're not on "Tempo" tariff, you seem to be using a lot of power.. if you have a rotary meter, count the revs and do the calcs

if you have the digital meter, there is a facility to see instant power usage going thru the meter.. i think it's sequence 7 on the buttons, whereby you reset the instant reading to zero and then you can count the units per time period and do the maths.. ideally, turn off all comsumer items you can, then do the test..

not really relevent, as every home is different.. i have a 25yr old 2 bed bungalow, log burner, normal electric needs and my bill is 750 tops.. as you say, maybe a good idea to check now.. Courage!

Very low electricity costs because LED's are used throughout for lighting although I don't have "spot lamps" because these always were a pile of rubbish from the day they were manufactured and only really worked with 50w lamps in them.

Heures creuses is on the back of the bill and ours doesn't start until 01:00am until 7am and 12:30-14:00pm. I don't count the heaters as they are seldom on but the water heater is something I would like to go over to solar on.

Swimming pool pumps are usually the biggest consumers of electricity for those that have them but as I developed the most efficient system in the world my season costs for this are around €30. I intend to put the system on a solar PV panel this year, not because it would save any more as the capital cost will take a few years to recoup but it's the natural next stage for me having done it in Spain where power couldn't be supplied to the pool without enormous expense and excavation

Our bill runs to about €50 a month on average. We have a straightforward Tarif Bleu 6kVa contract. We have only one electric radiator, in the bathroom, which is on a timer and runs for 30 mins a day (probably less as the thermostat on the radiator kicks in after about 10 mins). We refused to instal an immersion heater in our hot water tank and instead the water is heated by a combination of solar power and the wood pellet central heating boiler. Everything that can shut down automatically does so or goes onto stand-by (things like the tv, computer) or is unplugged when not in use. The biggest power guzzler will be the microwave combi oven which we use constantly instead of the main oven.

How to save money? Turn the heating thermostat down (even one degree helps), put thermostatic valves on the radiators so you don't heat unused rooms needlessly, don't heat the bedroom to the same temperature as the living room and SWITCH OFF THE LIGHTS as my wife is constantly telling me!

I too was surprised by the low bills. I am in a 10 year old house well insulated and paying 150 per month.

I am with EDF, on a plan that estimates, via past use, my annual consumption for the next year and breaks that into 10 equal monthly payments. Last year I was billed based on an annual price of around €1800 (€180/month x 10). At the end of the 2014 I received a €190 rebate for unused power. This was followed a couple of weeks later by the projection and billing for 2015, whereupon they have estimated around €2100!?!? I would like to know how, in light of the greatly overestimated 2014 consumption, the much higher 2015 projection was arrived at?

My all electric 3 br moderne was built in 2002. The water heater is very efficient, but needs to be inspected daily to see if it is running. It tends to shut down and must have the breaker turned back on and and the heater reset button tripped. This began a few years ago when they changed out the meter at the pole by the road. I have never been able to get a straight answer as to why this happens. Often the breaker has not been tripped, but the heater has simply turned itself off and needs a reset. There are often extended periods (a week or two) when this annoyance does not occur, but when it resumes it is almost daily and sometimes twice a day. Aggravating as hell, especially when it hasn't been tended to and is only discovered half way through a shower.

In the states the water heater resets are rather conspicuous red button affairs easily accessed on the side of the unit and set with a touch of a finger. My French heater reset button is a tiny little downward facing hole on a relay box on the bottom of the heater which must be reset by crawling under and inserting a thin rod (I use a shish kabob skewer) to push upward to activate the reset. A hellish arrangement at best, especially when it needs to be performed on an almost daily basis.

I guess I'd better go check it now.

Wish our bill was a low as those already posted. We bought our house (on the Normandy Coast) from an EDF employee who enjoyed free electricity ... so lots of "toasters" and not that well insulated.

In 2013 we paid 225 Euros per month.

In 2014 this was reduced to 179 Euros per month (we installed a log burner)

It will be interesting to see what 2015 bring.

We have a 3 bedroomed house of 3 storeys but currently live on the first floor. We try to heat with wood but the heat from the (new) insert doesn't get to the bedrooms down the coridoor. We pay 130 euros/month. I discovered after 2 years that our heures creuses which were marked as 14h -17h and 2h-7h on our contract were in fact set at 22h-6h so bang went my supposedly cheap washing. I recently got edf to change this so hope it will reduce our bill. We also insulated and renovated our loft over the last 12 months so hopefully the initial 195eu/month that we were originally quoted will drop even further than the 130eu. Also the 3 kids are in various internats during the week. The water heater certainly gobbles up the units. Perhaps a new one may be cost effective .

I forgot to mention a couple of points:

The water heater is set to start the heating cycle at 22.00 during the 'heures creuse'.

We have a water filtration and softening system, which is set to do the rinse cycle on the 'heures creuse' during the night.

I have replaced the 50W GU10 spots in the bathrooms and utility room with 3W LED spots, a power difference of 450W versus 27W. The bedroom light bulbs were all replaced with energy saving equivalents.

The network equipment and home media server are all built from low power components. The media server uses less than 50W when idle including the fans and disk drives.

We have the 'EDF Tempo' tariff which is very cheap over the course of a year, but requires some changes in family behaviour! Our bill is not high, I think 50-60 euros a month but I would need to check.

There are Blue, White and Red days determined by EDF based on demand.

Today is a 'Red' day and therefore the KWh price is very high, I think 6 times the price of a 'Blue' unit. Yesterday was also a 'Red' day due to the cold weather we are having. Therefore we are not using the oven or the tumble dryer, and we wait until a 'Blue' day to do all the washing.

There are only 22 'Red' days per year, 43 'White' days, and the rest are 'Blue'. The unit price for 'Blue' is very cheap and covers us for 300 days per year.

https://particuliers.edf.com/gestion-de-mon-contrat/options-tarifaires/option-tempo/la-couleur-du-jour-2585.html

James, we live in a six bedroomed stone house near Agen and we signed up to EDF Tempo a couple of years ago. Because of the complicated method of unit costings, we kept a spreadsheet (accountancy background) of consumption and bills. There are some horrible 'jours rouge' when it is over 50cents a KW and lovely 'jours bleu' which reduces costs by 90%. Weekends are never red and Sundays always blue. With a bit of management ( no electric ovens or tumble dryers on red days) we have managed to average under 10cents a KW throughout the year. We use electric for water heating (on night timer), oven cooking, washing, and bedroom heaters. Wood and paraffin stoves for living heating but to be fair, electric heating, except red days, would not be much dearer.

If we had air conditioning or pool pumps, or even pool heaters etc in the summer months (always blue from May to October) then the savings would be huge.

Our bill is normally around the 80 Euros per month mark but if I take out my wife's Pottery Kiln it would be approx 70 Euros per month. We have electric heating but never have to use it because the wood stove is suffice, all our lighting is LED except in the barn, workshops and stables. We are however on a 18KVA Tarriff and so the monthly charge is quite high. I also use an efegy electricity monitor for checking all electricity usage on the property.

www.energie-info.fr this is a comparison website for electricity companies in France to check and see if you are getting the best deal.

Our bill is embarrassingly enormous compared with the others I have just read, but we work from home and use the washing machine a lot outside of the cheap time. I suspect for us it would be best to have 2 washing machines and water heaters that get used/heated up overnight to make the most of the cheap time. All our heating is wood all our lights are LED.

Ours is about 40€ a month and we have all electric heating - we rent. Our flat has thick walls, well insulated with secondary glazing (it's ancient) and the roof has a very good thickness.

My first advice is insulation. For every pound you spend, you'll get back three within three years

http://www.uswitch.com/insulation/guides/home-insulation/#step3

We had a truly horrific bill! The consumption was where I thought it would be and the unit price didn't seem unreasonable compared with what we were paying in the Uk. However the big surprise came with the Connection charges and Taxes which effectively doubles the bill! I'm now looking at ways to implement a solar array to take care of all the pool pump consumption at the very least. And perhaps water solar heating as well.

If you're on a "pre-historic" account with EDF, better to stay on it. Once you change for a "new entrant "supplier, you can't ever go back to the tied low-tarif account with EDF, the only alternative is the new fluctuating account. According to what I've seen, there is quite a low percentage of people on other accounts than EDF right now, for that reason.

Ian did you sort out solar in the end? Using a lot of solar for an energy hungry pool pump is not the best way to go. I only need one small panel for the pool pump (69 watts on filtration)

I have a very small house and I’m a scrooge with electricity, I’m obsessive about switching lights off. I get billed every 6 months. Normally I use wood for heating but last year (end of 2016) my wood supplier stopped supplying and my wood stove developed a crack that needed fixing and what with one thing and another I didn’t get my act together and ended up using electric heating all winter. Usually my bill for October to March is around 250€ and this year it was over 500€.

We have a very small holiday home that has electric heating & hot water. Normally heating is set just on a frost setting other than the one week in 6 that we are there.

Our electricity bill of 100 euros per month does seem very high so time to do some checks on tariffs etc.

@Mat_Davies

It would be interesting to know just how much electricity your property uses… during the time that you are absent… and also, during the times that you are there.

Your bill seems exhorbitant to me, but that is without knowing the actual usage…