How much do you pay for Gas and Elec?
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  1. #1
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    Default How much do you pay for Gas and Elec?

    Per month??

    I am with Eon and getting slightly annoyed at how much they are charging, it has been on the news about their prices and how their profits are up 30% this year!

    I am paying £204 a month this is gas and leccy combined. We were only paying £90 a month but it obviously wasn't enough (even though we did meter readings every 3 months) so now they are creeping our direct debit up every 3 months. It now says on my account we are £500 in debit. So I suppose they will be puttin gup our direct debit even higher than it already is!! It feels like it is getting out of control!! WIsh I could just afford to pay them £500 this month an tell them to get stuffed!

    Just had enough with these companies - I work from home, have a family of 4, live in a 3 bed semi. Nothing really unusal about our usage, except I am often at home.
    Anyone else got big leccy/gas bills like me?

  2. #2
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    My lord you need to do some price comparisons! Are you on estimated bills all the time because this can make a huge difference. These days yoo can read the meter yourself and submit the reading to the power company online so it is read very quarter.

    We live in a 4 bed house which we had extended two years ago so our ground floor area is 2/3 bigger and we have enlarged one bedroom upstairs. We did have all new windows fitted when we had the building work done and that has made a big difference.

    Our payments has crept up to £175pm and then I got a meter reading at the beginning of this year and a bill and managed to get my DD reduced by £55pm

    We are currently paying £125pm and we have gas central heating, heat all our water via our new combi boiler and run two showers off it. For the first time in my life I cook all electric and that includes using a new massive american Wolf Double oven and Warming Drawer. There are 4 of us and all adults.

    We are with Scottish Power and have been for a number of years now. We took part in a thing earlier this year with an organisation earlier this year whose aim was to reduce power bills. My MIL changed companies as a result but Scottish Power can up best for us.
    Last edited by rickysmiths; 15-08-2012 at 10:24 AM.

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    Wow that is alot to be in debit.

    I have been with ScottishPower for quite a few years now. And like everyone else they have increased there prices. I am always conscious of how much we use and make sure to enter manual meter reading on the 1st of every month to stop any nasty surprises.

    I have been monitoring the difference between last years and this years each month. This year we have tried to reduce our gas and electricity as much as we can by all the usual methods. And we have done really well cutting down our gas usage. However due to the prices rises our bill for July last year was £39 for the month, this year we have used slighly less elec and reduced our gas by 1/5 and yet our bill for July this year was £59. So even though we have used less all year every single month we have paid more than last year.

    We live in new build home (2003), 3 beds, 2 adults and 1 child, and have made sure to put draft excluder tape around all windows and doors, put draft excluders on the bottom of all doors, gone around all skirting boards and filled in any gaps, put exter loft insulation in etc. I dread to think what this December bill will be as last years it topped £160 for the month

    We have a direct debit of £95 every month that luckily for us had acculamted over last summer so that by winter we were about £400 in credit, however by the end of this summer we will only be about £50 in credit so we will have to pay more into the account to make sure that we dont get any nasty surprises.

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    Yes Ricky I do a meter reading every 3 months online when they ask for it. I dunno what we are doing wrong really I don't!!! I mean, £90 a month was fine, but that went on for a good year befor ehtye put our monthly dd up to £167 now its shot up to £204 pm to try and get our debit down.
    Annoys me how I have managed to get so far behind even though I do metre readings every 3 months.

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    I pay £90 for my gas and £120 for electric per month. I think it's a lot but then when I was paying the bills before I went on monthly DD my bills were high but I think that's because I was heating the garage for my rabbits in the winter. I must admit I don't think twice about putting the heating on if I'm chilly. I refuse to be cold in my own home. BTW we also live in a 3 bed semi too.

    xxxx

  6. #6
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    I feel a bit better now. We live in a 3 bed and pay £180 a month for gas and leccy. I've been feeling for a while that we must be doing something wrong

    Sorry, doesn't help much Mollymop but you're not alone

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    we live in an extended 4 bed detached and my bill this month has just come in at £98 combined, we are with british gas and i give a meter reading each month x

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    That is ALOT of debit! Have you had your meter checked? A friend of mine found out after 8 months that they'd been paying a previous owners debt on her bill!

    I'm now with scottish power, having been ripped off by utility warehouse ( - Wouldn't touch them again with a bargepole!!)

    Did a uswitch price comparison thing, and at the time SP were the cheapest for me, as I had the previous years worth of consumption so was about as accurate as I could get, but called them and got an even better deal than the ones shown on the comparison sites - so worth doing that too

    It's just gone down from £120 per month (combined gas and electric) to £102 and that's giving readings every 3 months
    (3 bed semi, one adult, 2 kids, 20 year old house)

  9. #9
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    We are with British Gas and submit our meter readings every month, so pay for actual amount used for gas and electric. We live in 3 bed detached house (old so no cavity walls, etc) and we pay about £100 a month combined at the moment but it will be more in the winter when the heating is on.

    Check with your supplier that you are on the cheapest price plan and some companies do a discount for paperless billing. It all adds up.

    We got a gadget that shows you how much electric you are using and much it's costing. I got a bit OCD with switching off lights and not leaving things on standby, only boiling a little water in the kettle and it seems to have reduced our costs a bit. Cook all your veggies in the same pan or with a steamer on top.

    You might want to look into grants for getting solar power installed, my in-laws have it and are selling electricity back to the grid each month so they are in credit.

  10. #10
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    You have quite a lot of debt with your energy supplier and this is why your bills are so high. You are probably using £120-£140 a month, and the extra is paying off your debt (which at £60-80 will take 6-8 months to clear).

    At one stage we were paying over £200 a month, and this was because we had a lot of debt. Basically what happened was that when the energy company merged my gas and electricity bills together, instead of adding as a debit, they added it as a credit, which instead of making my account £400 more than it was, they made it £800 less than it should have been and this was not discovered until about 12 months later, and it took us about 2 years to pay this deb back.

    Another occassion, when I moved suppliers, the closing reading (of old supplier) and opening reading (of new supplier) were not the same, and I supposedly owed over £700 for one months usage. Thank goodness I discovered that.

    However what I really wanted to say is do a comparison http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/uti...as-electricity, and find out who is your best supplier and then do the swap. I did this a few months back and was able to do everything online. It was dead easy and I even got some cashback

    You are probably on your supplier's standard rate, and unless you swap or ask to more to a better tarriff, this problem is going to take even longer to fix, and cost you more in the meantime.

    I now pay £89 a month, same house .....

 

 

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