Im stunned! 130 Euro a month for power.
Here in New Zealand that would be a cheap month for us. 2 adults in the house, wood fire heating & gas cooking. Last months bill with discount for prompt payment was about 150 euro. And its set to go up, with our govt having just sold the last of our state owned power generation.
Tracy :-D
Thought about you and your cuppa Brian when I saw this! it's about how much time your kids take up
No one seems to sell the Efergy e2 Optical, cannot seem to find it on that site at all ? We don't have any room at all in our fuse box for attaching electronic devices and so something that can use the pulse is more suited. Oh well I will have to look at some of the other brands maybe.
We have similarly awful leccy bills, and much of it is down to heating and poor insualtion which we are gradually attacking (hopefully eventually with exterior insulation).
I put in place a délesteur to limit consumption of the heating, and to stop the whole house tripping out on cold days. The model I have has a sensor that goes around the incoming supply cable, and if it detects that it's close to a limit that I set it swtiches off power to certain circuits - heating, in our case. It may not be exactly what you need, but it is another element in the battle to keep the bills down.
Vic, to maintain a bac well you also need to regularly treat it exactly as you do with the fosse, Eparcyl or whatever weekly, which doubles the amount you use. When you have your fosse emptied (every two years for us) you need to have the bac emptied too and if it is a good firm doing it have your filtration flushed through (we are a high limescale area and recently I knocked a block of build up out of a pipe, so need it). None of it comes free, accumulatively it is part of the bill - as I said it costs 'some'. For people who do not have filters/traps on everything as we do it costs more. My point is that.
I've maintained a daily spreadsheet for the last 4 years to monitor our consumption, I read it everyday (easy as it's there at the bottom of the stairs so I walk past it every morning). We have three phase as we have a ground source heat pump that needs it and our average monthly bill over the year is around €140, this obviously varies wildly with the monthly winter bills at around €300-€350 per month depending on how cold it is and that's with the thermostat set to 19 degrees c, for every 1 degree c that it's turned up it raises the cost by €3 a day a current prices.
Gerald, we are similar to Sarah. Our kitchen is rather cramped for washing up by hand and also the amount of time, use of warm water, unlike other people I have seen we rinse things that have been greasy with hot and others with cold when doing it by hand. Then there is maintaining our bac degraisseur which costs some. Our dishwasher breaks some of the stuff down, the filters catch other stuff. Balance that out and in the end there is nothing in it, just the time saved. We try all washes at night, but right now I have the dishwasher full because of a backlog caused by having guests two nights in a row and the lack of space for hand washing a lot of it. Like Sarah, drying indoors is difficult. We have a 'kitchen maid' above our stove which we use over night. We use wood in that and have a wood fire, the smell of wood smoke on washing may appeal to the romantic minded but for people wearing it...
Don't use electric kettles. Easier said than done. You need to have a child in the car to get to school in 10 minutes and suddenly need a hot drink before facing the cold or howling gale. We use three 15k cylinders a year Gerald, we are a family and also have a social life but otherwise do not cook excessively. In fact, for most of the winter we use our wood stove to cook, even keep a reserve of hot water on one of the hot plates part of the time - not all because of steam causing damp and condensation not being clever in an old house.
It is a matter of needs and convenience in many cases. Our bill is nothing like that 'eye-watering' amount but still far too high. Unnecessary appliances left on, even when nobody is at home all day, is half of the problem. Right now I am reminding myself to head for a round the house tour to put lights and things like the stereo off that are not being used. So off to do the round...
This is all rather depressing. We are two people in a 2 bed house and our electricity bill each month is 195 Euros!! I didnt even know this was abnormal until recently when we started asking our friends and they were all horrified at our bill. 130 Euros seems cheap in comparison. I do have the PC going all day as I work from home so will be interesting to find out if that is contributing a lot. Going to have to do some serious thinking. Thanks James for your post. Very interesting.
For the dishwasher, you have to offset electricity use with water consumption. A dishwasher, if filled, uses way less water than you would use if you washed the dishes and pans for a family by hand. Same with a washing machine.
I use these machines at night during heures creuses and dry our clothes whenever possible outside. However, sometimes you just have to finish off in the dryer. My house is too small to have clothes hanging about drying inside so I use it when I have to.
That little device looks interesting. It would be useful to show my boys just how much electricity they consume with the XBox and when they leave the radiator on!
To add another comment : don't use electric kettles. Use the gas ring. A 13kg bottle of butane lasts me around six months.
Your electricity consumption is eye-watering. People in the thread have been talking about tumble driers and dishwashers. Tumble driers simply are not needed where I live. I dry my laundry inside the house. As for dishwashers, well, you have the stuff in your hand as you put it into the dishwasher, why not just put it into the sink and wash it instead ?
We've had one of these cable-clamped consumption meters for a few years now in our place in the UK and plan to do the same in France, once we're permanently installed.
It has encouraged us to replace many of our domestic appliances to A rated equipment and that has helped reduce and maintain a budgetable tariff.
Most noticeable for us was the visibly high consumption of things like kettles, irons, electric ovens and tumble-dryers! These have all now been replaced (over time) with A rated units and the kettle has disappeared, to be replaced with a plumbed-in hot and cold water dispenser which serves the family with cups, glasses and even saucepans of filtered hot and cold water.
All of this has helped reduce electricity cost.
Don't forget that quite a large proportion of your bill is made up of taxes and levies . One thing you can do to save money is to reduce the power rating of your incoming supply to the next lowest band ( lowest is 3kw , then 6kw, 9 kw 12, 15, 18 etc.) ,and therefore pay a lower standing charge and less taxes etc. If you are on 3 phase then unless you think you really need it ( maybe for a well pump or industrial machinery) then get your supply changed to single phase, and you may find you can drop a band without noticing any difference! Most French cookers and water heaters can easily be converted to single phase with a simple adjustment. If you do this , you can probably almost certainly drop down to the next lowest band. I'll tell you why ; If your supply is three phase and you are on the 12KW tariff, your 12Kw is divided up into three losts of 4kw, which basically means that you can only draw about 4Kw or approx 20A on any one phase before you trip out the EDF disjoncteur. Even if your house circuit wiring is well balanced over the three phases, it only takes a kettle or a toaster to trip your EDF disjoncteur. But if your supply is single phase , you will not trip the EDf disjoncteur untill you exceed the full 12kw, or 60 amps .You could drop to 9Kw and change to single phase and not even notice, but pay a lot less annually. I am not sure if I have explained it very well , but hope someone understands!! . I am a registered sparky here in France btw. There are other clever devices called delesteurs that can tempoarily shut down non priority circuits , ( heaters, fans etc) while a kettle boils for instance, to avoid tripping out the EDF disjoncteur.
In the UK the power companies give kit like this away if you ask may be worth a try in France. EDF gave us loads of energy monitors to give to old folk in Somerset when I worked for Care and Repair. (May have been something to do with them wanting to build Hinkley Point Nuclear Power Station but they did give stuff away alot, but so did E-0n and Scottish and Southern and British Gas etc).
Hubby has just had similar query from a client [he's a sparky], having switched everything off, out during the day, running hot water and washing machine at night with tariff bleu creuse their bills were rocking in at €1200 a year. Only to show that their meter is old and running way to fast... so they are following up with their provider to have a new meter.
Yep, need to go outside to put off unnecessary lights and then check bedrooms and appliances just using power pointlessly. So a big like.