We all know what's going to happen, and sooner rather than later. I'm expecting energy prices are going to increase across the board by around 50% on gas and electricity. My thoughts then turned to the espresso machine…probably uses more power when it's cold, perhaps as much as 100W per hour..I know some people have cited massive increases in their bills when they have an espresso machine on all day…so I'm preparing, I would imagine the machine will lose only half the energy this way? The underneath towel is to add the extra insulation under the group and keep the top towel wrap in place. I'm already turning green! [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/sPQzAA6.png]

@"DavecUK"#p4730 Classic Dave’s solution to the problem! 😂😂 I continue to switch the machine off after making coffee. I don’t want the machine to run from 6 am to 9 pm. 😊 Am making a separate thread for green!

me personally, pureplanet went bump on me giving me a massive increase at home, was tied till april 2022 at work my gas and elec have no cap, since march 2021 when i cam out of contract ive seen my monthly elec bill go from £200 to £430 per month, these are out of contract rates atm, its getting crazy

Well, after about 20 minutes of non-use my Sage turns itself off. Plus as it takes only about 6 minutes to get up to temp it shouldn't use too much. After a really good two year fixed deal came to an end in December, we've just gone on to Octopus Go tariff where between 12:30 and 4:30 am the charge is 5p kWh. No good for the coffee machine admittadly unless I'm having a spot of insomnia, but we put our washing machine on for then as that eats electric and I charge my EV then too.

Our tariff is fixed until Aug 23. So, Am good. But, our costs did go up by £50 a month to about £162 pm. Thank God, I went fixed as some one advised flexible. 😊

We changed to Octopus when we were down south, we have always been on a fixed tariff and our bills were around £120 month. We moved up North to Yorkshire and bought a new build our bills are £80 month at most. We renewed to a fixed tariff again in September after a lot of deliberation thinking prices had been stable for some time, so glad we did. Hopefully when it all settles down we can get another fixed rate not sure it will be the same though. All our family are with Octopus they have been really good.

@"LMSC"#p4731 you can because it only takes 15m to warm up, so it's actually worth switching it off if your not going to use it…in fact, even a low power mode would be worthwhile on the Evo, might see if something can be programmed into the motherboards, to actually drop the group temp after a configurable number of minutes of non use. e.g. drop by n C, after n minutes, with brew boiler switching off after n minutes. This is because brew boiler only takes 3 minutes to warm up. In this way a machine could drop into economy (if you enable it) after say 15 minutes and be warmed up again by touching the panel. As soon as the group hits the preset temp, you will be ready to go, probably about 3 or 4 minutes….depending on how low you turn the group down. The energy saving would actually be quite large!

@"DavecUK"#p4762 I am sure you will come up with a solution as an enhancement in the future release. If it can be programmed like a PC - Hibernate, Sleep, Restart and Shut Down! 😬 We mostly make 5 -6 cups in total 2 in the morning, 1 at noon, 1 in the afternoon and 2 in the evening ! Perhaps, decaf in the night.

@"Cuprajake"#p4732 I was with simplicity energy, fortunately they went bust a few months before the energy crisis and I went onto the supplier of last resort British Gas, something called Simplicity Promis until April 2022 which felt like being rodgered up the rear end, but as it turned out was a blessing in disguise. 3p per unit for gas and 17.9 for leccy

I am with octopus on their flexible rate since my fixed rate with them ended at the beginning of December. I am not sure how much I am paying monthly ( was previously £59) as I have just had smart meters fitted and the readings haven’t settled into any pattern but watching the monitor thingy add up the electric units is a bit of a sharp intake of breath whenever the electric shower is used. To make matters worse, my boomerang child has just boomeranged back home to live again and takes two showers a day and wears clothes once before throwing them in the wash. I have been dithering over fixing the rate before April but just cannot commit myself to a tariff that doubles the price of my gas for the next three months even though I know things are going to get very much worse. I switch my machine and grinder off at the wall as soon as I am done.

> @"4W5"#p4814 I am with octopus on their flexible rate since my fixed rate with them ended at the beginning of December. I am not sure how much I am paying monthly ( was previously £59) as I have just had smart meters fitted and the readings haven’t settled into any pattern you must absolutely know the rate per kW hour and standing charge so you can make apples for apples comparisons. They rely on obfuscating these numbers.

Energy Prices

DavecUK

Elcarajillo The last P- heater I remember had a domed gauze with a reflector behind and a tank at the back. It burned with a steady glow UNTIL the vacuum built up in the tank and suddenly released a dollop of fuel which flared up and out of the burner. Made by Sankey ??

I had a similar one….was a very blue flame and put out a shedload of heat…..the wick sat in a pool of paraffin in a ring….I remember the domed gauze would glow a fairly bright orange at full power. You’re right though, they did used to flare up, so you had to keep an eye on them. I used one as a student in 1981 to heat my room in an old “short life” solid wall properly in London….my Dad always said don’t leave it unattended. I didn’t realise it was due to a vacuum forming in the tank. Mine was an Aladdin Senator..I think it was rated at 2.5 or 3 kW

Elcarajillo

That is the one😂

Cuprajake

My supply moves over from shell to octopus on monday, and on the first day they take 230 from my bank, they will have supplied 0 gas or electric. Naughty that

PortafilterProcrastinator

Cuprajake Really? Is that an auto-switch with Shell having gone bust?

Your existing DD is meant to transfer over, they’ve never touched mine.

Cuprajake

No, thats moving to a 12m fixed.

But i thought it a bit out of order

Ill give it a month of actual reading and go from there

It scares me really as 12months ago i was paying £90 per month so to jump to 140 and now 230 in 12months is shocking.

dfk41

Cuprajake Octopus, like many of the newer companies always want you to have as much in their bank as they can get. My friend is with Bulb and they tried to put his monthly payment up from £80 to £176. He rang them and they refused to negotiate it or wait and see if his usage justified that.
Boris comes back empty handed fro Saudi Arabia……..did he really think they would increase production and decrease the price as a favour? He is running out of options. Eventually he is going to have to cut out electricity bills immediately by 25% by ditching the Green subsidy…….then ditch the whole Green Agenda and start issuing licences for North Sea drilling and exploration and start producing Shale Gas. Do you know the ‘science’ with regards to tremors…..they picked up movement equivalent to dropping a water melon from a two story window……

Cuprajake

there trying to get sunak to stop the ni raise, it needs something doing,

DavecUK

The problem is all the UK companies are just that, companies, not charities. Any oil or gas extracted will simply be sold to the highest bidder and will not bring prices down, or give us energy independence. For that to happen would require a significant change in the law. Such a change would have to force the companies to:

sell at a price fixed by the UK government
only sell to the UK market
only sell a limited about of excess production to the world market…to protect reserves

Clearly that’s not going to happen.

For Nuclear, we would have to have a state run reactor, so we could set the price…considering the 2 current reactors from EDF (85% French owned):

Sizewell C has not even been government approved yet and won’t be on stream until 2036 at best, if it runs to schedule. If instead it’s another Hinkley point C, expect it in 2050 (as expected government approval is 2024)
Hinkley Point C was government approved in 2010, but won’t come on stream until 2026. Unless the issues found in a similar reactor design at Taishan in China, cause it to be delayed.

Being realistic, I suspect Hinkley point C won’t open in 2026, but probably 2 to 3 years behind schedule. So in the short term 4-7 years, we have nothing in the bag….as we tumble towards the Nivarna that is net-zero, with no plan of how to get there. Pushing for more and more electric cars to go on that already stretched national grid, without even the insistence that cars from this April 2022 have to form a part of national grid storage, or they can’t be sold in the UK. Then at least our windmills and solar might be able to store the excess rather than dump it to ground.

It is reassuring that over the last few decades (where I have been worried about energy security for 10 years), we are run by.

Giphy - ostrich GIF

and controlled by…

Giphy - Plotting The Simpsons GIF

DavecUK

Heres something I found from 2015…seems it’s not quite right

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/2010-to-2015-government-policy-uk-energy-security/2010-to-2015-government-policy-uk-energy-security

dfk41

Fracking again……..

Rob666

SMRs are the answer. Smaller ones even than the ones being developed by Rolls Royce and a Fluor subsidiary.
If the powers that be extract their digits, these could be up and running in five years on legacy nuclear power stations sites which already have the links to the grid and infrastructure.

DavecUK

Rob666 SMRs are the answer. Smaller ones even than the ones being developed by Rolls Royce and a Fluor subsidiary.
If the powers that be extract their digits, these could be up and running in five years on legacy nuclear power stations sites which already have the links to the grid and infrastructure.

I think the SMRs, well actually, Micro Modular reactors are the only practical way forward in the shorter term…but even the RR solution won’t be ready until; the early 30s. I think they may be partnered with NUScale and back in 2017 they were predicting a mid 2020s deployment…which obviously won’t happen.

Worse still, many of the designs are quite large and I prefer the idea of the Micro Modular reactor design based around TRISO Fuel, which gives walk away safety and pretty much unattended operation. Unfortunately these are not the SMR solutions being looked at for the UK.

The specific X-Energy designs I like because there is no phase changes within the reactor vessel (usually the cause of problems) and of course no need for containment buildings/vessels.

Current situation: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/small-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx

X-energy website, with the award winning TRISO fuel: https://x-energy.com/

Easy Video explainer:

Rob666

DavecUK “Worse still, many of the designs are quite large and I prefer the idea of the Micro Modular reactor design based around TRISO Fuel, which gives walk away safety and pretty much unattended operation. **Unfortunately these are not the SMR solutions being looked at for the UK.”

I couldn’t agree more! This is what I was referring to when I said, “**Smaller ones even than the ones being developed by Rolls Royce and a Fluor subsidiary.” They can be carried on the back of truck and are far smaller and safer than the proposed SMR designs which are still huge in real terms.

DavecUK

I’d happily have an X-Energy reactor in my local neighbourhood.. In fact they could be placed all round Motorways in the empty useless land surrounding them. All that localish power would be good for the charging of electric cars as well.

Meldrew

JahLaza

Looking at ‘stuff’ using energy in the house here, and was thinking of removing the remineralisation cartridge in the osmio for a couple of weeks to clean out the Elizabeth boiler. I reckon the osmio is saving us about 30/33 quid a month in electricity usage. Would that be correct? (Osmio claims to use 0.1KWh per 24 hour, I’m estimating we would boil the kettle approx 15 times in the day (might be over egging but 2 young kids etc.) online tells me kettle used approx 0.112KWh for 2 minute boil). I’ve calculated our KWh cost currently at €0.29, looks similar cost to some posts here in UK except it’s pence so 30/33 quid euro or stg

Gagaryn

JahLaza I think you might be mixing kw and kw/h. If the Osmio is using electricity at a rate of 0.1 kw/h per hour for 24 hours it is using 2.4 kw/h per day. Like you say, an electric kettle uses about 0.112 kw/h for 1 litre of water. So if you do this 15 times a day you would use 1.68 kw/h per day.

So the kettle costs less than the Osmio. This makes sense to me as heating water in kettle is about 85% efficient. Heating water is all about efficient use of energy and the Osmio must use a similar amount of energy to heat the same volume of water as a kettle. The benefit of course is it is able to heat smaller amounts, with a kettle it is often used to boil 1 litre of water when only a mug full is required.

Edited - for clarity

LMSC

My daughter who shares a 2 bed flat in London paid £40 a month for gas and electricity. The service provider wants £195 a month now! 😱 I wondered how people on daily wages, doctors - jr doctors and teachers, etc will survive. She is worried and says she can’t afford a hike like this on her NHS salary. The only thing we could do as her parents is to support where required. Obviously, she doesn’t want that for right reasons.

We then have a some outstanding helps in the form of NI hike, a 1p tax cut, 5p duty cut in fuels and a raise in NI threshold. Every little helps, I suppose. 😑

I have been speaking to a few folks who installed energy saving devises. some folks have spent £15k-£30K on heat pumps, solar panels for their 3 beds. One consultant told me one got that removed, while the average spend on maintenance is about a K a year at least. Still, they don’t produce enough to feed energies to their 3 bed properties. I think, it will be at least 5-10 years before we see this space really maturing, if it all. So much for net zero.

What a mess we all are in! God help us all!

JahLaza

Gagaryn yes you’re correct, I miss-read the osmio consumption so your figures are correct there. Ah well!

Inspector

I just checked with smart plug, osmio consumes;

2600watt for 100degrees of water,

2600watt for 85 degrees

2600watt for 65degrees

14watt for filtering water

4watt for dispensing room temp water

I thought it would consume less energy when dispensing 65 or 85 degrees of water. But maybe it’s like lelit Elizabeth mixing hot water with room temp water :)

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