Cost of living - 2022!

[andydclements]

2 hours ago, Kimbers said:

I topped up a month ago, have 3/4 of a tank with a 3200 litre tank so hoping I am ok for a while!

But here's an interesting question. My Boiler is off. I turn it off when we don't need heating and use the Immersion Heater. However, After checking "hourly costs" of devices in the home it says an immersion heater can be up to £1 an hour!!!! 

So is it cheaper to have the Boiler on or the Immersion? I have checked online and there are arguments for both.

A bit of online searching (I know the methodology but not the thermal capacity of water and can't be bothered to go to basics myself).

If it's a 125l tank and you want to raise the water temperature by 50deC, then it's 8kWh. It may be that you want the water temp to be increased more (if it's starting at 20degC and you want 80degC then it's 9.6kWh.

At 30p/unit (kWh) that 8kWh is £2.40 which is a lot of oil, it's 2.5-3l depending on price, which equates to a daily usage equivalent to 1000l of oil a year if it was permanently summer. I don't know about your usage but summer time (with no immersion, we have the boiler kick in and heat water and I doubt we use oil at that rate. So, it looks as though oil boiler is as cheap or cheaper than electric immersion heater for hot water.

[Bibs]

2 hours ago, Kimbers said:

use the Immersion Heater.

That's the same as turning on a kettle in the tank, they're outrageously expensive to run and I've always though for emergency use only. I always heat the water with gas, it's considerably cheaper per kwH. 

[Geoffers]

Same here, never use the immersion. Boiler goes on for 30mins in the morning & that is enough to keep the water hot for a full day.

[RobinB5]

31 minutes ago, Bibs said:

That's the same as turning on a kettle in the tank, they're outrageously expensive to run and I've always though for emergency use only. I always heat the water with gas, it's considerably cheaper per kwH. 

We've only got electric. With electric showers there's no need to heat up the full immersion tank each day, so we've resorted to just using the kettle, primarily for washing up. Next on my list is to insulate the kettle to increase it's efficiency.

[red vtec]

Cheaper to use dishwasher for dishes, washing by hand uses lots more water that needs to be heated. Use dishwasher when its full.

[RobinB5]

27 minutes ago, red vtec said:

Cheaper to use dishwasher for dishes, washing by hand uses lots more water that needs to be heated. Use dishwasher when its full.

Cheaper in terms of energy to heat the water or amount of water used?

[red vtec]

21 minutes ago, RobinB5 said:

Cheaper in terms of energy to heat the water or amount of water used?

Both, I have a place in a very hot country where water is sparse. It’s cheaper to run the dishwasher in water consumption and heating it.  It’s surprising how much water you use washing by hand and therefore have to heat. 
 

but I do make sure dishwasher is full 

[Barrykearley]

4 hours ago, Kimbers said:

So is it cheaper to have the Boiler on or the Immersion? I have checked online and there are arguments for both.

1 litre of oil = 10kw. Your boiler will be probably 89% efficient. So 8.9kw

do the maths on what’s cheapest per Kw

[RobinB5]

There are so many different analyses of dishwasher vs. hand washing, most of which compare to some assumed standard hand washing approach, e.g.: https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/which-research-reveals-how-little-water-dishwashers-use-compared-to-hand-washing-aGVXG4M9NInY

With hand washing the requirements are: the temperature of the water and the amount of water per place set. There are some pretty generous assumptions made for both of those categories. Whereas with a dishwasher you can only go so low as your Eco wash setting, with hand washing it's in your hands (so to speak). Which begs the question: how little water and at what temperature can you get away with when washing your dishes by hand. The answer being far far less and much cooler than all these 'studies' assume, most of which have a dishwasher vendor bias and all ignore the RoI when buying a dishwasher.

[Barrykearley]

1 hour ago, RobinB5 said:

Next on my list is to insulate the kettle to increase it's efficiency.

You’ll need to turn the heating up In the kitchen then 

[RobinB5]

5 minutes ago, Barrykearley said:

You’ll need to turn the heating up In the kitchen then 

@Barrykearley, don't get me started on that bullsh*t

https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/simulating-the-real-world/2013/11/18/heat-your-home-office-for-8p-a-day-part-1-really/

https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/simulating-the-real-world/2013/11/19/heat-your-home-office-for-8p-a-day-part-2-thermal-interception/

https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/simulating-the-real-world/2013/11/27/heat-your-home-office-for-8p-a-day-part-3-it-takes-time/

https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/simulating-the-real-world/2013/12/18/heat-your-home-office-for-8p-a-day-part-4-comfort-temperature/

https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/simulating-the-real-world/2014/01/10/heat-your-home-office-for-8p-a-day-part-5-putting-it-all-together/

 

 

[Colin P]

Hmm dishwashers.... now I get that most power is used in heating the water, but the quick wash on our dishwasher is 30 minutes. The Eco wash is 3.5 hours!! There must be a minimum water temperature that is necessary/will do the job. How the hell can a cycle that is 7 times as long be the economic one.....

[ChrisJ]

Don't get me started on handwashing and the dishwashers - my wife hand washes everything before putting it in the dishwasher.

[Colin P]

2 hours ago, Bibs said:

That's the same as turning on a kettle in the tank, they're outrageously expensive to run and I've always though for emergency use only. I always heat the water with gas, it's considerably cheaper per kwH. 

Ditto. I'm not a fan of combi boilers, having back up of hot water tank and immersion heater and a log burner ensures that in most situations you'll we warm and hopefully have hot water. 

Besides we have 3 Aqualisa digital showers and removing the hot water tank would mean replacing them.... and that ain't gonna happen 😍

@ChrisJ saves on dishwasher cleaning products 

[ChrisJ]

We replaced our ancient boiler (1970s I think) earlier this year, and put in a combi boiler. Previously, when the hot was or the central heating was on, the boiler used to run most of the time. Also my wife (again) would turn on the hot water and not turn it off - no option for an hour - either on or off. I'm interested to see what our usage is going forward, so far looking to be about 70-80% of last year.

In 2015, we didn't have our gas water heating on at all, as the installer of a new tank wouldn't come out to fix an issue, so we used an immersion heater and electric radiators for a year. We used a grand total of 370 kWh of gas for cooking in the year, compared with our normal 11500 kWh. Our electricity usage was 10500kWh for the year compared to around the normal 4500 kWh.

 

[Colin P]

Well based on last years use and the price cap rise (October one) looks like our energy bill will be c£6.2K next year.

Lets see what impact the new boiler and solid conservatory roof will make (although I pretty much turned off the conservatory radiator last year), just left on enough to make sure the pipes didn't freeze.

[Kimbers]

40 minutes ago, Colin P said:

Well based on last years use and the price cap rise (October one) looks like our energy bill will be c£6.2K next year.

Lets see what impact the new boiler and solid conservatory roof will make (although I pretty much turned off the conservatory radiator last year), just left on enough to make sure the pipes didn't freeze.

I thought my £400 a month was a lot (starting October!).

When the Company fitter our new Boiler, Water tank and replaced all the pipes (the old ones weren't building standard and unlagged meaning we lost so much heat in transferance) he said "turn off the boiler in the summer and just run it on emersion heater its much cheaper on this kind of new unit.

Note to self, turn immersion heater off today!

[ChrisJ]

This is what happened to our immersion heater - fitted 2015, photo Apr 2021

[exeterjeep]

Welwyn GC must be a hard water area!.

My son's combi has not been working for a few weeks, seems difficult to get anyone to come round. So in the meant time he is having cold showers...and saving some cash.

We never put the immersion on, use the oil boiler all year, but we use a lot less oil than the house next door.

 

[Colin P]

I dare say the kettle would look as bad after 6 years if if wasn't cleaned. I replaced our hot water tank this year the old one was from the 80's at a guess. There was a good 12 inches of "shale" in the bottom of the old one. I could barely move the damned thing.

[Colin P]

55 minutes ago, Kimbers said:

I thought my £400 a month was a lot (starting October!).

I have a plan. I'm going to turn everything off, leave the kids at home and go down the pub every night with the Mrs. It'll be cheaper. If I go to Weatherspoons we can eat too. 

[andydclements]

59 minutes ago, Colin P said:

I dare say the kettle would look as bad after 6 years if if wasn't cleaned. I replaced our hot water tank this year the old one was from the 80's at a guess. There was a good 12 inches of "shale" in the bottom of the old one. I could barely move the damned thing.

I hadn't even thought of that. Our water is described as "aggressively hard", and the  tank is from the hearting system installed c 1980, so  I wonder how any water gets to circulate in that tank at all.

 

2 hours ago, ChrisJ said:

We replaced our ancient boiler (1970s I think) earlier this year, and put in a combi boiler. Previously, when the hot was or the central heating was on, the boiler used to run most of the time. Also my wife (again) would turn on the hot water and not turn it off - no option for an hour - either on or off. I'm interested to see what our usage is going forward, so far looking to be about 70-80% of last year.

 

When our system boiler was fitted in c 1980 the installer fitted a switch for the pump, so the timer comes on and goes off as per the settings, but the pump only comes on if that timer is on AND the switch is on. That way we can have hot water without the water to the rads being heated. It's still just gravity fed circulation to the tank, but  they are flipping big pipes.

[Colin P]

@andydclements it could well be a good idea to replace the tank. If you are heating significant quantities of debris in the tank that won’t help and the coil could be as bad as Chris’ immersion heater so the heat exchange will take longer if it is (think of efficiency between a new kettle and one covered in scale). I just cleaned out our kettle and it takes less than half as long to boil now. 

[ChrisJ]

@andydclements - we had an ancient switch/timer that had seperate circuits for the H/W & C/H - but you had to have the H/W on for the C/H to work - which was fine. You could set 2 times for the boiler to be on. Big problem was that there was an override button that when pressed, the boiler would fire up until the next scheduled stop. Many times, it would be pressed after the evening shutoff, but not turned off.

Same with the immersion, we did have a timer for it as well, but a wall switch would turn it on - I'd come up to bed and hear the water tank boiling away. Well, they can't do either of these now.

The other thing was there was no thermostat so the bloody boiler would just keep on running and the radiators would just get hotter and hotter. The cheap as chips TRV valve the useless guy who installed them stopped working within a month or so, so had to leave the fully open for the radiator to work at all.

These are all fixed now, so this winter will be interesting.

[Bibs]

Wholesale gas down 29% today...

https://www.cityam.com/gas-prices-plunge-as-germany-closes-in-on-storage-targets