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Hi all,
This morning I visited a new client who needs me to find out why there bills are so high.
At the moment I can only give a quick rundown of the installation as it was just a general chit chat about the issue. I will be going back to do some proper investigation in a week or so.
This is an old manor farm with the main house having been extended along with an attached barn conversion which is their main living space. 3 story's including the loft conversion so quite a considerable space. They have a 3 bed cottage ( Detached )on the land along with stables a plant room and a wooden barn converted for parties in an L shape. So they called me because they are getting extremely high bills. The 2 that I saw was 1 for last 3 months and 1 for the previous 3 months. The latter was for £4100 and the other was £2700. I did get a quick look at a couple others and they were similar costs ranging anywhere in between.
Firstly can anyone say whether this is normal for a house of this size when they have assured me that they don't use the emersion heaters as they have 2 big oil boilers in the plant room.
Wet underfloor in the new half and the barn end and radiators in the old part of the house.
Also my first thoughts are that I need to familiarise myself with the wiring of the entire installation so I can eliminate circuits one by one. Any advice is welcome as always.
 
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Smart meter been fitted?

find out if its single phase, two phase, or single phase.
Rent an an energy consumption monitoring unit which will simple have clip on CTs.

you could have fault current flowing through a high impedance path with would be seen as a large load and not trip any protective devices, its possibly a TT system you have on site
 
find out if its single phase, two phase, or single phase.
Rent an an energy consumption monitoring unit which will simple have clip on CTs.

you could have fault current flowing through a high impedance path with would be seen as a large load and not trip any protective devices, its possibly a TT system you have on site

It is 3 phase main DB in the plant room.
3 phase DB in main house which had been completely redone around 2008.
Single phase CU in party barn.
Single phase CU in cottage.

Was thinking something similar myself about current flow but not sure where that current would be flowing.
 
This is an old manor farm with the main house having been extended along with an attached barn conversion which is their main living space. 3 story's including the loft conversion so quite a considerable space. They have a 3 bed cottage ( Detached )on the land along with stables a plant room and a wooden barn converted for parties
what do they except with that to have free electricity.
may be some one leaving a light on to longer!
 
what do they except with that to have free electricity.
may be some one leaving a light on to longer!

Do you think that £4100 is acceptable for a quarter when they know they don't use a lot of electricity themselves. Clearly they don't want free electricity and I can assure you they quite well off but why would anyone pay for something that they are not using regardless of how much money they have. Really don't see the point in your comment.
 
Let's see what kind of load you need to rack up those bills.
Typical leccy price 12p/kWh
Total consumption over 6 months (4100+2700)/0.12=57MWh
6 months = 24*365/2=4380 hours.
Average continuous load 56666/4380=12.9kW.

Whatever you use electricity for, by the time the energy leaves your house it's almost entirely converted into heat (unless you live in a pumping station or mine headworks). Therefore if this consumption is real, there must be the equivalent of 6 1/2 2-bar fires of heat being pumped into the house all the time. Unless some of the long-hour load is aircon of course. If you were supposing half of the consumption were due to a fault, whatever makes up the resistance of the fault (earth rod, someone suggested) would be getting as hot as two immersion heaters on full whack could make it (i.e. not cycling on their thermostats, elements on full all the time).

It seems unlikely that so much energy could be dissipated unseen in a domestic environment, so either they have a generally high load (e.g. sneaky extra electric heaters and/or aircon and poor thermal insulation, lots of inefficient decorative tungsten lighting on 24/7, all their considerable space in use much of the time) or the readings are out. Unless, of course, someone has set up a hydroponic cultivation department.
 

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