Owning your own home

By blocking it you've got a reasonable chance of introducing damp into your house by way of condensation

Ah thanks for putting it all on the line there, it's useful info :)

I 100% guarantee that it will get more comments and pier recognition irl.

That's the quay issue, obviously.

Ground source here. V happy but we did put in UFH in new extension and had to update the radiators elsewhere.

My mother in law had ground source installed and UFH retrofitted a few years ago - very pleased with it. Comfort and energy bills a big improvement on the previous oil fired boiler.

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.

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

It might be an LED or possibly just a bog standard old 40w bayonet bulb I had around as I remember changing it a few years back. It is on at max a couple of hours a month if that. The PIR might be on more due to the family of foxes that run past in the night. I'm fine with the old bills at £90 (which were split two ways) but £1450 is taking the piss.

£1450 is taking the piss

It might not be.

That's the problem.

It might be that there was an LED, and it was only on a couple of hours a day. Then it was changed for an incandescent bulb, and actually left on overnight a hell of a lot.

That wouldn't come close to £1450, but if their billing is retrospective then they may have bumped to £750 to catch up on arrears for a couple of years of underpayment (electricity in the region of £350 per year), and then when they see it increase again they could be bumping again to get ahead of it.

But... more interestingly, you said they want to see the meter... so the communal leccy is on a distinct circuit with it's own meter, great... so just ask to see the costs, to see the bills they received. Simple as that.

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.

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/
  

Ours is budgeted at £610 this year, in a 4 storey block with 7 flats. Whenever anyone comes in the front door the PIR lights up about 50 lights all the way up the stairwell, we also have a lift.

I read about this and @Velocio mentioned it in his post. I guess to mitigate that, something like a chimneysheep could be periodically removed to allow the chimney to breathe.

By having the chimney un-capped but not running the fires, are we at risk of this anyway?

Anyone got a solution to a 140mm cut-out recessed light?

These are 1980s downlights and they are godawful. I don't want to replace plasterboard and replaster... hoping someone knows of some kind of adaptor that fits a 14cm hole and allows the mounting of a normal ceiling light.

By having the chimney un-capped but not running the fires, are we at risk of this anyway?

Nope.

You get dew, but it evaporates and the building breathes.

Cap it, and you trap the moisture and start causing a problem.

Seal it from the bottom and cap it from the top and you risk trapping moisture. The brickwork might still let water in (if mortar isn't great), so everything has to be great for you to avoid creating long-term problems.

It looked to me to get rapidly expensive and with too many risks I couldn't control... and a chimney sheep was a cheap fix with no risks. Plus I did like that moths might eat that rather than my sofa.

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).

https://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/Products/LTHCP.html

Ta.

a chimney sheep was a cheap fix with no risks.

I thought so...but @currid seems to think differently. Would be good to get to the bottom of that.

Yawn inducing but...

Can anyone recommend some LED GU5. MR16 bulbs with the pin-style connectors.
Tried a number of them and they have all been flickery and shite.

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It might be the 12V drivers that are the problem. A lot of them aren’t LED friendly. You can either try to find one that is or rip them out and replace with mains GU10s.

Curtain tracks for bay windows. Recommendations?

I hd some from Silent Gliss, deets in the interior design thread.

'kin 'ell they've got a lot of options. I just want hand drawn, white and not shit.

At the other end of the spectrum, probably, we got some from Dunelm that were quite basic and easy to fit.

That could well be it.
Need to find it first - guess it will be hidden in the ceiling somewhere.

Looking there too, cheers. I can't remember who I got the last ones off in the old flat. That was a bay too. They were metal and "bend it yourself". I distinctly remember shitting myself that I'd fuck it up but managed to get them spot on just wrenching them over my fat thigh/perfect bending tool.