Electramate 2000 Doubling Energy Costs On "Winter" setting...

Hi, there. I hope you can help me with this as I'd love an expert's input on this. I'm renting a 2 bed, electric-only flat with an Electramate 2000 thermal store installed. Following the instructions in the Electramate manual when the weather started getting cold I switch it to the "Winter" setting so that the heating would work more effectively if needed. However, when Eon sent us our quarterly bill we'd been charged approx £150 per month for electricity , compared to our £47 per month before flipping the winter switch.

Eon had me running all manner of checks and tests as they informed me something large was using a lot of power at all times. It was only last week when I tried turning the thermal store back to "Summer" that I noticed out Electric meter stopped shooting up and returned to normal usage.

Now, when I ran this by Eon they told me that their only responsibility is to make sure that the meter is running properly and they're charging me correctly for what I was using, which as far as they're concerned they were.

From your experience, is it normal for one of these thermal stores to use so much electricity at all times (peak and off-peak) when set to the winter setting? I'm feeling like someone's cheating me out of a lot of money for wanting to heat my flat.

If it helps, one of my tests showed that in a one hour period the thermal store used approx 9kw of energy at a charge of approx £1.20 (Eon's Economy 10 tariff).

Any help or info you can offer would be very much appreciated!

-- Broke

Hello broke,

This is somewhat puzzling. The whole point of the Electamate is that it knows when the off-peak service is available and uses it to top up the energy stored. It should know when the E10 tariff is ON and when it is OFF.

Even so, if keeping the switch on SUMMER reduces your electricity bills then I suggest you save yourself a load of stress and money and just leave it on SUMMER. There's no point in pursuing Gledhill to sort out the fault as they went bust last October and the new Gledhill company will tell you it's nothing to do with them. This is legally, if not morally, correct.

Don't forget however, that your energy consumption will leap anyway when the weather is cold as your heat losses will be much higher. This alone might account for the higher consumption.

Cheers, Mike