We recently received an electricity bill for €110 and I decided it would be a great challenge to see if we could get it below the €100 mark. Overall I'm quite happy with the bill given that the apartment is completely electric (storage heaters & immersion). We have two meters for day & night units so it is quite easy to see how much power is going towards space and water heating.
I was checking my electricity bill over the last year and a half and was surprised at the amount of power going to heating. There is a fairly consistent pattern over that period of time with approximately 250kWh used during the day and around 600kWh during the night. The anomalies in the middle are due to a couple of estimations. I started to do a little bit of research into my immersion timer to see if there was a way of reducing the number of hours. I found that the number of hours can be reduced by toggling the red and blue switches beneath the gaps in the front that indicate off peak hours. The front panel has to be removed to do this change. Unfortunately they were already set to the minimum amount of hours which I suspect is the default setting.
After playing a bit with the switch to see how it worked and how long it was cutting in for I noticed that it wouldn't be difficult to cut away some of the switch to cause it to turn off faster. As it stood it was staying on for around 5 hours minus the amount of time the thermostat in the immersion disconnected the power. I got a small snips and cut away around 5mm of the blue material beneath the timer clock. This reduced the time to approximately 3 hours. I will leave it at this setting for the next few months and see what difference it makes to the night units as at the moment we have more hot water than we know what to do with. :)
