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Comment by hughes | Hacker News Reader

Is 906 GBP (~1100 USD) typical for a household? That seems outrageously high.

Annually, that sounds about right.

Oh, I thought this was monthly. The article doesn't specify, and all other bills I've seen are monthly. Do Brits pay annually?

Electricity consumption will vary during the year so it seems fair to give the yearly total to have the actual cost; and you can divide by twelve if your prefer a monthly average.

Meanwhile, if they only gave a monthly figure, one could wonder if it's an average or if it's taken in January or July.

Many UK homes have electric heating or use supplemental electric heaters during winter, so the consumption of summer vs winter changes a lot.

This is why there has been a big push for offshore wind in the UK, it's an island that has strong winds during winter.

> Electricity consumption will vary during the year

We heat with a wood burner and so have very flat usage over a year. Heating requirements are lower here in Auckland, New Zealand.

During winter the days are shorter so the lights are on more often.

People tend to eat/drink more heated things than during summer (think coffee maker and microwave ovens).

They also tend to spend more time inside due to the weather so they use things needing electricity (TV, computer, radio...).

You don't pay annually, but because of the substantial variation in energy usage throughout the year, you'll generally price-compare on an annual basis, and usually the monthly payment is a kind of pro-rata value where you over-pay in summer and under-pay in winter.

Normally pay monthly by Direct Debit, but because usage varies so much between summer and winter we assess and estimate usage annually.

This is how it used to be in Finland, too. More houses than in many other countries are heated electrically. With the cold winters here the variation is extra big.

Still since a couple of years ago bills have to be paid according to monthly (sometimes bimonthly) real consumption. I had the feeling this was even a regulatory requirement to make people aware of the real costs and encourage saving. Cannot find a reference to that now. Either I remember it wrong or the search results are just too polluted by marketing pages.

All meters are read remotely with hourly precision. An increasing share of households has spot price contracts. So the price changes every hour. Sometimes negative, sometimes 60 cents/kWh or more to mention the extremes. Switching to 15 minute pricing is on the way already

No, we pay monthly, but because we're a cold country that doesn't have widespread domestic air con, energy usage is _way_ higher in winter, so talking about monthly averages doesn't make much sense.

Historically quarterly. Some of us still do pay on that schedule.

£900/mo would bankrupt most of the country lol

Yes

Type | yearly usage | average annual cost

Low (flat or 1-bedroom house / 1-2 people) | 1,800 kWh | £669.95

Medium (3-bedroom house / 2-3 people) | 2,900 kWh | £943.36

High (5-bedroom house / 4-5 people) | 4,300 kWh | £1,291.34

source: https://www.britishgas.co.uk/energy/guides/average-bill.html

I was surprised to see how low electricity usage is.

The fairer measurement is probably gas and electric, and your source says ‘ According to Ofgem, the average British household has 2.4 people living in it and uses 2,700 kWh of electricity and 11,500 kWh of gas. This works out at 242 kWh of electricity and 1,000 kWh of gas per month.’

We don’t have gas at home and use about 10,000kW/h here in New Zealand.

Yeah that's what's wild about it. Those prices are so high despite the fact that Brits use so much gas

In a historic home in the Midwest a single month in the depths of of the winter could easily be 700-800 usd.

This is an extreme outlier. I have a 4,700 square foot home in the Midwest, electric heating (heat pump + backup direct heat) and only occasionally hit $300/mo in a cold spell.

Heat pumps are something like 5-6x as efficient as resistive electric heaters. So no surprise that your bill would be lower.

Of course, heating an entire house with (non-heat-pump) electric heat in a cold climate is kind of crazy. Natural gas is way way cheaper. But I've seen it in old houses here in the Upper Midwest, so it's not _too_ out of the ordinary.

Heat pumps are so affordable now, that just feels like a poor decision-making rather than an economic hardship. You could finance a heat pump and the savings would pay itself off in a year.

That completely depends on local electricity costs and climate. We get about 4 months of freezing temperatures and when I did some back of the napkin math, a heat pump installation would be cheaper than gas over its lifetime, but it was only by about 10-20%, at a much higher upfront cost.

I'm not an expert so I could've made a mistake somewhere, but my calculations said that the system would have to survive for 10-15 years before it would pull ahead of a new gas boiler.

Yeah it's called apartment living. I hit nearly $350 in Oakland a couple years (and many PG&E rate hikes) ago in a 600 sq ft apartment. Even if I wanted to pay for a heat pump installation it's doubtful the landlord would've been on board.

Last time I did the math, even with a 60% efficient furnace natural gas was cheaper than an electric heat pump. PG&E's electric rates are simply that much more expensive than their natural gas rates. Currently that's up to $0.49/kWh on the most popular rate plan vs $2.49/therm. Keep in mind that the fifth and sixth electric rate hikes of 2024 were just approved today by Newsom's regulatory body and don't factor into the price I quoted.

Lol what. I'm paying $.10/kWh. https://booneelectric.coop/my-account/rates/

https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/...

Unreal

I pay about $60 a month to heat a well-insulated apartment in Copenhagen, similar size.

The average for an 80m² apartment is $1100/year.

After the 1970s fuel crises, Denmark invested in district heating and that seems to have paid off.

I was also going to point that out. Resistive electric heating costs could easily reach that much, but it’s a horribly inefficient way to heat your house.

My first house was in the midwest, built around 1920, and had plaster walls with no insulation. It was only around 1400 sqft, but we did have (natgas) heating bills in that range ($600-$700/mo December through February).

That’s crazy. I live in New York in an old drafty house. My highest bill is about $400-450 and it’s much colder here. Those rates are brutal.

2400 sq feet, brick, limited/no insulation, original wood windows. I wouldn't trade it for the world though, even if its crazy to heat/cool.

Monthly as others have said.

900 is a small household with limited heating, more like a condo than house.

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