Our house is largish, we have 4 beds with 4 bathrooms (3 working) however for 95% of the time there is just the two of us here. We have 3 water heaters, one for downstairs, one in our bathroom and one for guests which is turned off 95% of the time. We have an electric cooker and oil fired heating. In the sous sol there appears to be 3 phase power to a couple of points but they are not used or required.
We are on 12kWH and paying EDF 151 Euros per month. I was advised by someone that I could comfortably drop to 9KWH which would considerably reduce the costs.
Whilst I am happy enough with UK electrics I don’t really get the power limitations and how that affects what you are paying.
Can anyone explain please and would you think I’ll be OK to move down to 9KWH?
Always a tricky thing to work out. You probably could get by with a 9kVA supply but you’d need to be careful.
Most ballons/water heaters use 3kVA, so if all they were on at once, that would use up your entire supply. Just switching on one more appliance (light, heating pump, washing machine, kettle etc) could take you over the limit and trip the supply. Equally, 2 water heaters plus the cooker would take you up to the full 9kVA - again, switch on something else and the supply is likely to trip.
The best thing is to find out the rating (in kW or kVA) for each device you use and just add them up. If the total of the ones you’re likely to have in use at any time is less than 9kVA then you’ll be fine.
Incidentally, have you looked at something like the Tempo tarif? I have a slightly smaller house than you but with a big workshop that is used a lot. I am on a 16kVA Tempo tarif and my bill works out at about 70€/month.
Edit to add:
Your energy supplier’s website should have details for the standing charges associated with the different levels of supply - 9kVA versus 12kVA, for example.
You could go to 9kw and use deselecters so items would switch off if you were going to exceed the limit, such as switching off the water heater whilst you are cooking.
The difference in abonment between the 2 levels isnt that much though, reducing your usage is where it counts.
As @Corona said, the difference in abonnement between 9 and 12 isn’t very much (about€3/month). You would be better off moving to theTempo EDF tariff and having your water heaters, washing machine, dishwasher, dryer only on during HC
Thank you all for your input. I should have mentioned that the water heaters are on HC and we run the washing machine and dishwasher during the night on HC.
I’ll investigate the Tempo tariff, it sounds significantly better. I’ll also review our actual usage to see what our daily consumptions is.
With my supplier, HC on the cheapest days (blue) are about 50% cheaper, and HP about 30% cheaper. Middle days (white), they’re about 20%/10% less and on the expensive days (red) about 300% of normal during the day, 150% at night basically on Red days I use gas and wood as as few led lights as I can get away with!
There are 22 red days in the year, 43 white and all the rest are blue.
But 2.2kW is 2.7kVA assuming a power factor of about 0.8. The power supplied is specified in kVA, yet most appliance plates show kW. I admit that I had rounded 2.7 up to 3. Slapped wrist, Brian
