I don't understand my gas bill and their website is useless!

[Eight Taiwanese Teenagers]

I seem to have been charged £242 for 3 months worth of gas. Is this normal? I've never paid a gas bill before!! I'm assuming not, as it seems absurdly high...

help me

[ccab]

My last gas bill was £288, also for 3 months. But it meant my girlfriend could walk around in no clothes comfortably, so it was worth every penny.

[sick as a pike]

What temperature do you people operate at?  This is a not especially well-insulated Victorian house which, as I work from home, has had the heating on most days over the winter.  Our last 3 month gas bill was £142.

[mook]

whoops.

[The Widow of Brid]

Is it your first bill in a new house? When we got our first gas bill here it was ridiculously high, it turned out that they'd put us on the most expensive tariff without consulting (or indeed telling) us. We challenged it and got it knocked down by about 70 quid.

[Vaguely Phallic]

If you're with British Gas, and assuming you don't have a 2 rate meter (i.e. 2 sets of dials, clocking different rates for day and night use):

Aside from offers you can buy into, such as guaranteeing no price rises until 200x, and small discounts for paying by direct debit, you have to pay for what you use ultimately, at the same tarriff as everyone. There's little point in comparing your house with another VW's because:
- they'll be of different sizes;
- in colder/warmer parts of the country;
- with appliances of varying efficiency;
- with different numbers of occupants and appliances and lifestyles and preferences.

The meter simply charges you for the gas you use. If your meter readings have been estimated previously (likely, BG are getting a lot of complaints about bills like yours at the moment) then they were too low, so you weren't paying enough.

If you feel strongly your meter is being inaccurate you can ask them to come and test it. But if they conclude it isn't faulty they'll charge you £65.

Edit: sorry sorry sorry. It's your first bill? Do you mean you're only paying for three months of use? Gas only? Assuming you didn't fail their credit check and have to pay a deposit? £80ish a month does seem a bit high, paparazzo.

[Lady Beaner]

We just got ours for the last 3 months - £219!

The thing is I don't think is in inaccurate! In our flat my sister had been putting the central heating on all fucking day when she was off work.

Irony? The fucking boiler broke last night and we have to wait for the plumber to come around tomorrow lunch time... *Tiny Tim* I'm soooo cold.*Tiny Tim*

[gazzyk1ns]

I just googled for the average UK gas bill, and apparently it's about £628 (I assume that's annually of course, although it doesn't actually say) for a 3-bed semi, so it appears some of you do have rather high quarterly bills.

However, I did find this site for those of you looking to reduce your heating bills. They seem like a fantastic idea but I couldn't see any mention of how you're meant to fit them; if you cut them, or they have pre-made slots so you can slide them down the back there, then great. But if you're meant to loosen the two bolts in order to swing the radiators down before sticking these things to the wall, then you'll surely need to drain the central heating system first, then do all that crap like bleeding it afterwards too? I'm pretty sure that's what it would involve with radiators like I've got here, anyway, as soon as you loosen the main bolts to any real degree, filthy water starts leaking out (as I found a few months ago whilst attempting to... actually the less said about that the better. Er, but no, I wasn't trying to do something sexual with a radiator, it was just a bit of ill-advised 3am DIY). I bet if you paid someone genuinely competent to do all that for you it would cost at least a couple of hundred quid, too.

In summary: Hmmmmmm...

[MojoJojo]

I have a one bedroom house, with a fire being the only gas appliance. For the last estimate, British Gas have estimated my bill at £0 (as it has been the for the previous couple of quarters since I haven't turned the fire on). Now since I have actually been using the gas fire for the last three months, and since British Gas have announced that they are going to cut prices in a couple of months, my cunning plan is to wait until they cut the price before I phone in a new meter reading and get a proper bill. The idea being that I pay the reduced rate rather than the current one. Does anyone have any idea whether this will work?

One of the blokes at work today was talking about the wonders of his newly flushed heating system. He spent £500 to have some workmen pump in some trademark liquid into his system, and now his house is apparently warm as opposed to cold.

This is boring, except that the phrase "are you gravity fed or fully pumped luv?" entered todays lexicon of work phrases.

[Vaguely Phallic]

You'll still pay the same, in the end, because you only pay for what you use, and the price cut is calculated from the same date for everyone automatically. But I'm sure you can delay this for a bit, kind of pointless though. Better to pay manageable accurate charges than get a surprise IMO.

[MojoJojo]

But the point is that they won't know when I used the gas. Even if they average the gas usage across two quarters (assuming I update them at the end of this quarter), I'll still end up paying less since I'll use less gas this quarter than last quarter, so I'll still be transferring some of the expensive gas usage to the cheaper gas usage.

So unless they decide to fuck me in the ass and hold back the cut cost until a meter reading is submitted, I should save a little bit of money.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Thanks to a whopping administrative error by Powergen, we haven't had to pay for our gas for the last 6 months, which is very cool, as I couldn't afford it anyway.

[Marv Orange]

My last gas bill was £288, also for 3 months. But it meant my girlfriend could walk around in no clothes comfortably, so it was worth every penny.

We'll be the judge of that, pictures please.

[ccab]

Certainly. But it'll cost you £288.

[Labian Quest]

I seem to have been charged £242 for 3 months worth of gas. Is this normal? I've never paid a gas bill before!! I'm assuming not, as it seems absurdly high...

help me

You've not given a lot of detail (e.g. do you have a gas boiler and/or central heating? and how many rooms are there in your house/flat) but If you've just moved into a new place, it's possible that you're being asked to pay for gas that was used by the previous occupier (people are supposed to notify the gas and electricity suppliers when they move out of somewhere and then pay for any outstanding amount that they've used)

[Eight Taiwanese Teenagers]

GCH + hob + very rarely used gas fire.

8 smallish rooms plus hallway/stairs.

I think I payed the one previous 3 month bill before without actually looking at it...

[rudi]

That's weird.

I often look at my bill without paying it.

We're psychic untwins!

[Labian Quest]

GCH + hob + very rarely used gas fire.

8 smallish rooms plus hallway/stairs.

I think I payed the one previous 3 month bill before without actually looking at it...

Well depending on how many of the rooms you're heating, how warm you like to keep them and how well insulated your house is then that probably isn't too far off what you'd expect to pay, other than that I would check to see if the bills you've paid were based on estimates (usually has a 'e' next to it) or actual readings - it could be an overestimate based on the previous owner's usage, or if it's based on an actual reading, your first bill might have been a big underestimate and you could be making up the difference with this one.