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PIR cost would be invisible. Barely a couple of £ over the whole year.
Light bulb cost can be calculated here https://www.electricalcounter.co.uk/light-bulb-running-costs
What bulb type do you have? LED makes sense for communal area
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We have about 10 lights on our landlord’s supply, not all of them LED, one of them a whopping halogen uplighter, and our bills are nowhere near that.
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Electricity bill for about 3 years was consistently around £90/year. 2019/2020 it went to £750 and then last year 2020/2021 it went to £1400. For the communal electricity alone!
On a fairly high rate of 25p/Kwh, a 40w bulb on for two hours per day would be £7.30 for the year.
It's probably in the 10 to 20p range, but a high* daily standing charge of 60p per day works out at £219 for the year.
- 60p was the highest in 2019.
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/utilities/electricity-standing-charge/
- 60p was the highest in 2019.
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It might be the standing charge.
The light alone is unlikely to cost much. The general rule of thumb is that a 1W lightbulb on 24 hours a day for a year will cost £1.
So a 100W bulb on for 6 hours a day (1/4 of the time in total) would be £25.
We had a similar setup (house converted into two flats) years ago. Electricity bill was £15 a year as the shared hallway had a single lightbulb in it on a separate meter.
Then the bill jumped to £20/month. Nothing seemingly had changed. (And we were joint freeholders with the flat upstairs)
It turned out to be the electricity company had helpfully moved us to a new tariff based on our usage (and not the total bill) without telling us. The problem was the new tariff had a much higher standing charge, the whole point of the previous tariff was that the standing charge was the lowest it could be.
A few phone calls to the electricity company sorted it out, with an apology and a credit that ended up covering that electricity bill for about 2 years.
The other option we had planned was to just get the shared circuit removed and wire the existing light into our flat. The extra electricity cost would be negligible and no extra standing charge. We left before we ever had to sort that out though.
We've a similar setup in my current place (house split up into 3 flats with a small communal hall for us and the flat upstairs, an LED PIR security light, plus a communal store area with sockets that we can use to run a cable out to the garden for mower/etc). No idea of the size of the bill as downstairs handle it as part of the shared freehold and it comes out of the fund that we all pay into. I'll try and find a copy of the accounts to see how much it costs but, again, I think it is priced such that the standing charge is very low and usage is low (a bit more than a single bulb on a timer but still low).
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Velocio
Sharkstar
user69121
Greenbank
@PQR
There was some talk about leaseholder Vs freeholder. I'm a long leaseholder and currently in "discussion" with the freeholder who are a large London based housing association over service charges and communal electricity bill. Most of the time they're ok, like a silent partner who randomly writes letters and S20s
Some background, my flat is one of two 2bed flats in a converted house. Communal area is a v small hallway off the shared front door.
Electricity bill for about 3 years was consistently around £90/year. 2019/2020 it went to £750 and then last year 2020/2021 it went to £1400. For the communal electricity alone!
As you can imagine I'm not happy and they don't seem in any rush to rectify. I've got someone who has at least asked for the meter reading last week and so will follow up at the end of this week. I'm not sure if they think our property is a large block of flats so they just tried their luck but it seemed to be a random doubling of cost from last year. For one internal light and one external PIR I'm damn sure they wouldn't use that much leccy unless we're powering the whole street.
Any way, rant (for the moment) over.