Deb's Digest
Debbie Atkinson’s family life column, as featured in the Southport Visiter.

Tuesday 5 August 2008

THE GAS BILL

I'm very glad that I've just completed a maths course. As I've said earlier in this blog, I'm determined to keep tabs on our gas and electric usage. Lights have been switched off; washing has been hung out and we're eating salads. Our daughter's daily shower has been cut by half to ten minutes and she doesn't know it yet but that time will have to be slashed by another 50%. I took our readings a week ago and again today but that is worthless without knowing what we're paying per unit. So I've just been on to "John" at Scottish Power. He told me that to work out the gas charges I must do a calculation. I multiply the units by 39.1 then by 1.022640 then divide by 3.6. He said "If you look at the back of your bill it tells you all that." I looked and here is what it says: "Multiply the answer by the calorific value and the correction factor and then divide by 3.6" .

3 comments:

  1. We don't have this problem out in the Cheshire sticks. We don't have gas we have oil fired central heating. It saves all those complicated sums but it costs an arm and a leg to fill up the oil tank every now and then.

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  2. Are you very poor?

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  3. Hi Sandgrounder - let's just say I'm significantly poorer than Scottish Power.

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