Oxley Woods Living

Life in an Oxley Woods eco house

 
 

Posts Tagged ‘low energy bulbs’

 

Electricity bill from hell

November 18, 2008

Check your meters folks.

This week we had our first electricity bill from ScottishPower, and my God it was scary… Our quarterly bill was in excess of £600!!  Now, due to our problems George Wimpey have offered to pay our bill, as they’re using a lot of power coming in and sorting out all the issues, but still, that’s a HUGE amount and didn’t bode well for the future when we’ll be picking up the tab.

Checking the bill, the reading was an “actual” reading, as opposed to estimate, so it wasn’t looking good.  Picking myself off the ground I ventured outside to double check our meter, and it turned out it was about 4,000 kilowatts less than the “actual” reading on the bill.

A quick (and it was quick, hats off to ScottishPower in answering the phones rapidly) phone call later and an amended bill, reduced by nearly £500, is on its way to us as I type.  Thank heavens.

Just goes to show it’s worth double checking your meter readings, even if they claim to be “actual” figures.  I thought with all the energy saving features, bulbs, appliances etc the bills shouldn’t be too painful, hopefully when the builders move out things will improve further.

Let there be lights

October 16, 2008

All the time, please.

We’ve had a strange problem with some of our lights.  The Oxley Woods eco homes are fitted with low energy down lighters in all rooms, well all apart from some of the earlier builds, apparently.  They’re supposed to be about 70% more efficient than regular down-lighters, most of them in our house appear to be Aurora branded 11w, 2700k temperature (warm white) GU10 type down-lighters.

There are a few downsides to the choice of lights in these houses.  First of all, they’re supposed to be eco homes.  Now, when you see that they’ve replaced the down-lighters with low-energy equivalents you’d think that’s a great move, and you’d be correct in thinking so.  But when you see the number of lights, you realise that it’s also a very strong case of form over function.  Our kitchen area has five lights, our living room has 12, the the bedrooms either four or six.  It’s serious lighting overkill.  It looks fantastic, but not really very eco conscious, and I dread the day we have to replace them, a household total of 75 lights!

Anyway, I digress.  The problem we had specifically was that after a few weeks in the house, I noticed one bulb wasn’t working on the top floor landing (where there is a total of four installed).  So, we had a replacement fitted FOC.

More recently, I was sure only three were working again, but when my wife checked later, all seemed fine.  Then the next day, only two bulbs lit.  Then later again three, then the next morning, all four?!

So, now assured I wasn’t going mad, we had the electrician pay a visit.  He’s replaced all four bulbs earlier this week, and so far so good, they’re all lit, whenever they need to be.  IF they go mad again, the next planned move is to replace the holders and check wiring, if that fails, the electrician thinks we should call a priest.