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Excessive Gas Consumption - Not sure what to try next!

mjr_havoc said:
my gas usage has gone down from an average of 225 kWh for 01-20 Jan to just 129 kWh for 21 Jan (yesterday).
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How do you get 129kWh? If that's from the m3 readings on the smartmeter, the problem is we're hoping that's wrong, so you're being billed too much. It's still something like 2x typical usage, after all the tweaks listed in #115 (specially the electric fire in the study!), which I would guess make the house less comfortable than you'd like. Unless your place is very untypical in terms of losses, insulation etc.
I don't believe TADO, Nest, smart TRVs etc will give more than a marginal improvement in gas consumption, and take a long time to pay for themselves, if ever.
 
Harry Bloomfield said:
OK, it has taken me no less than two hours of going around in circles, trying to order an EBUS adaptor. Another badly designed website, which allows a potential customer, to get stuck in a hole, they cannot climb out of - it let me sign in with Google, failed to have me set up a password for the site, then wanted the password I had not set up, to log in and pay for the item..

Anyway, adaptor ordered. I then tried to make sense of the software needed, to connect to the adaptor, Windows - and nothing made any sense at all to me. This page - https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/windows

In (very) simple terms, how do I set this up please, on a Win11 laptop?
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Sorry, I will try and look into this later for you. My setup is a server running Unraid. I then run home assistant as a docker container (you can think of it as an app). Never ran this on windows.
 
I run Home Assistant OS on a £60 micro pc purchased from an ebay seller. Its permanently running and is very low power.
 
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fixitflav said:
How do you get 129kWh? If that's from the m3 readings on the smartmeter, the problem is we're hoping that's wrong, so you're being billed too much. It's still something like 2x typical usage, after all the tweaks listed in #115 (specially the electric fire in the study!), which I would guess make the house less comfortable than you'd like. Unless your place is very untypical in terms of losses, insulation etc.
I don't believe TADO, Nest, smart TRVs etc will give more than a marginal improvement in gas consumption, and take a long time to pay for themselves, if ever.
Click to expand...
Yes these readings are from the smart meter.

I do believe them as I am using less heating. This was mainly not heating the room with the chimney which was sucking all the heat out of the room so the "smart" SRV was constantly heating the room 24/7. This also applies to other rooms as the "early start" function would start heating the rooms about 3-6 hours before the set temperature.
 
Harry Bloomfield said:
I have a pi, collecting, and making available the data from my weather station. I wonder if that could be made to collect data from both, at the same time?
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Probably. I have a full-blown server but am thinking in the future of deploying multiple raspberry pis (for ebusd, for ad blocking, for file sharing & backup, etc.) as well. This will give me much more flexibility. I havent yet used any raspberry pis but have heard many great things about them.

For your use case I think it would depend what raspberry pi you have and what you have running on it. I dont think it would be a stretch to get this working on it too. It is not very resource intensive.
 
mjr_havoc said:
I dont think it would be a stretch to get this working on it too. It is not very resource intensive.
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It’s best to think of HA as a OS, rather than an app. Install on appropriate HW as a OS or in supervisor mode for ebusd. I originally installed on an early PI then moved to a micro PC. HA addons like ebusd, Adguard, Mosquito, Ngnix and others need OS or supervisor mode.

HA itself has its own learning curve. It is incredibly powerful, open source and has lots of support online… however this forum is not the place to get it.
 
Just a quick update:

So for two days I have managed to get my usage down to almost half the average for the rest of the month. The 01-20 Jan average gas usage was 225 kWh. The usage on 21 Jan was 127 kWh, the usage on 22 Jan (yesterday) was 125 kWh.

For 21-22 Jan, I was the only one at home during the day so was easy to shut off all the heating and just use an electric heater during the day.

For today and tomorrow, the heating will be on throughout the day as my wife is at home. This will be a good test to see how this compares to my average usage for earlier in the month. I have now also blocked the chimney and it seems to have eliminated the cold draught we were feeling, so I have also turned on the heating in this room too. I do anticipate that my usage for today might be higher than tomorrow since this room has not been heated for a few days.

Thank you all for your invaluable help so far with this. I will continue to investigate and report back with results.
 
mjr_havoc said:
Just a quick update:

So for two days I have managed to get my usage down to almost half the average for the rest of the month. The 01-20 Jan average gas usage was 225 kWh. The usage on 21 Jan was 127 kWh, the usage on 22 Jan (yesterday) was 125 kWh.

For 21-22 Jan, I was the only one at home during the day so was easy to shut off all the heating and just use an electric heater during the day.
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mjr_havoc said:
Thank you all for your invaluable help so far with this. I will continue to investigate and report back with results.
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You haven't said whereabouts in the country you are. If it's somewhere cold it might be part of the explanation.

Have you checked the smartmeter flow reading against expected boiler demand?
 
fixitflav said:
I don't believe TADO, Nest, smart TRVs etc will give more than a marginal improvement in gas consumption, and take a long time to pay for themselves, if ever
Click to expand...
when I had my boiler replaced, our plumber is old school and not so keen on all that stuff, he just fitted a basic stat and Drayton timer, but we had hot water priority and weather compensation with basic dumb TRvs

the house is now massively more comfortable, we keep the heating on for long hours, TRvs mostly open and the only thing I tweak I tweak is the weather comp curve

I keep thinking about upgrading to TADO, but what will I actually gain??
 
fixitflav said:
You haven't said whereabouts in the country you are. If it's somewhere cold it might be part of the explanation.
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Sorry! I am near Birmingham, West Midlands

fixitflav said:
Have you checked the smartmeter flow reading against expected boiler demand?
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Do you mean the boiler consumption test? Sorry I've not got round to that yet. This will have to wait until next week when it is only me at home again.

On a related note, Since updating my meter readings into the Tado app, it is now more accurately showing actual kWh usage and forecasting my usage for the whole of this month to just over 5,000 kWh (which is what I think I will end up with again).
 
fixitflav said:
No problem! Pretty average then

That's right, the test I suggested in #91. That will give a check on the smartmeter

If it's any help, mine for November-December (30 days) was 2305 kWh
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Wow that is quite low! Mine is a 5 bed with 16 rads & 2 towel rails. For comparison, can I ask how beds yours is and number of rads please?
 

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