Clear as Night and Day
More on power. When we moved in, we chose to keep EDF as our electricity company. They were already supplying the house, and we had liked them back in France, so why not?
For the first time, we have a smart meter that tracks our power usage and keeps us abreast of what we're spending. Like, at 12:30 pm today we're at:
Yes, £6 by noon today! It doesn't take long to translate that to £180 for a month!
What we do know is that the vast majority of our power use is for heating - specifically the storage heaters mentioned last week.
However, we also knew that because we have a smart meter, we also paid different power rates depending on time of day. Hurrah! I logged into the EDF website and found:
Wow! We can cut our energy bills by more than 50%! Now this is good news!
Next question: when does "Night rate" start and end? We've seen lots of advertisements from energy suppliers (while watching Grantchester on ITVx) and know that every company has some kind of cheap period when you pay less. The one that caught my eye was something like 11 am to 4 pm on Sunday, for laundry and such.
An hour of digging deeper and deeper into the EDF website told me nothing, though. You would expect that such a simple and obvious thing would be easy to find, but no luck. So I gave up and phoned them.
(Note: in the UK you don't get stuck on Hold for a half hour while they claim to be experiencing heavier than usual call volumes!)
Night rate starts at 12:30 am! And ends at 7:30 am!
So, guess who will be setting an alarm and crawling out of bed at 1 am to turn up the Input knobs on the storage heaters?
Not the Cambridge University MPhil student, for sure!
