Confusing hot water boiler set up, need help programming

[nalted]

Hello, some background: I am a novice at house related things, as im a 20 yr old uni student in newbuild uni house, with 6 other housemates (7 total). As of 29th October, our bills shot up like crazy, from an average of 17.25 kWh of daily electric usage, to now 56.9 kWh per day. We believe to have diagnosed it to be our water boiler. We are not sure why it suddenly changed on the 29th October, but we believe it for some reason is on all the time instead of turning on at programmed times. We know how to turn it off entirely, and how to turn it on, but not how to program it.

I have attached pictures of the set up so that anyone who may recognise how to use it may help. The only thing I can see that *might* program it is the ESI esrtp4rf+ thermostat, as its seemingly connected to the water boiler (in pictures), even though we have a separate gas unit for house heating, and even though online documentation specifies that the ESI thermostat is used solely for the central heating too. Other than that, we have no idea how it works and why it has suddenly gone insane.

I plead for your help, as our student house leasing company are terrible and ignore our cries for maintenance help, by the time it comes, we will be a few hundred pounds down again.
Note : The final picture is our Intergas Compact HRE 30 SB gas boiler, don't think its involved in this issue, but thought i'd attach anyways.

 

[terryplumb]

If your electricity usage has increased something must have changed. Any new electric devices been introduced ,ovens,electric fan heaters etc ?
I assume you are using the immersion heater to heat the domestic hot water ? Do you leave it switched on permanently ?

 

[Mister Banks]

Its an S plan system so the boiler should be heating the hot water. I wonder if the immersion has been permanently connected to mains via the switch in photo 3.

 

[Mottie]

As above. You shouldn’t be using electric at all to heat your hot water. The immersion is purely a standby way of heating your water if the boiler breaks down.

 

[nalted]

If your electricity usage has increased something must have changed. Any new electric devices been introduced ,ovens,electric fan heaters etc ?
I assume you are using the immersion heater to heat the domestic hot water ? Do you leave it switched on permanently ?

We are not sure what changed, we looked through receipts and messages to see if any new electrical equipment had been bought which could have caused this but found nothing. Furthermore, our energy company somehow has a breakdown of our use, which shows how the water in particular shot up. Will attach october and novembers breakdowns here. 333 kWh in Oct to 902 kWh in Nov.

 

[nalted]

Its an S plan system so the boiler should be heating the hot water. I wonder if the immersion has been permanently connected to mains via the switch in photo 3.

I see, what would you recommend i do if thats the case as im not too sure what that means.

 

[nalted]

As above. You shouldn’t be using electric at all to heat your hot water. The immersion is purely a standby way of heating your water if the boiler breaks down.

Oh i see, in that case what would heat our water? As our gas boiler doesn't have any options that allow us to change how the hot water works, (our gas boiler has got some hot water buttons but they're unresponsive, and online it says its because its purely for central heating).

Also you say about boiler breaking, we lost our hot water completely around the date that our energy shot up, 29th October, could that be related to the boiler breaking?

 

[terryplumb]

Those figures don't make much sense the water heating usage has rocketed but the overall percentage has dropped ?
Aside from that what do you do to turn on/ off the domestic hot water heating currently. And what happened when you lost your hot water completely ?
What specifically happened to rectify that loss ?

 

[nalted]

Those figures don't make much sense the water heating usage has rocketed but the overall percentage has dropped ?
Aside from that what do you do to turn on/ off the domestic hot water heating currently. And what happened when you lost your hot water completely ?
What specifically happened to rectify that loss ?

Not too sure why the percentages have dropped, could that be a meter issue that i should follow up with the energy company?

Right now we are turning off the switch in the boiler room (picture 3) when we dont want hot water. When we had lost hot water, we turned that switch on to get it back. Our initial thinking was that someone accidentally turned that switch off (as in picture 3) and thats why we had no hot water, so we turned it on to get our hot water back. However, we aren't actually sure at all if it was ever on. For the month of high bills, it was permanently on, and only started changing that 3 days ago when we got the bill for november.

 

[terryplumb]

Ok ,so no engineer visited to establish why you suddenly had no hot water,you just started using the electric immersion ,hence the higher usage.
Previously the gas boiler would have done that .
Electricity is close to 4 times the price of gas.

 

[nalted]

Ok ,so no engineer visited to establish why you suddenly had no hot water,you just started using the electric immersion ,hence the higher usage.
Previously the gas boiler would have done that .
Electricity is close to 4 times the price of gas.

Yeah, we have had genuinely horrible problems with our student housing, as most houses under the agency use the agency's engineers/contractors, however our house specifically uses the landlord's own contractors, so we end up waiting a long long time for a fix. Took 1.5 months to fix a leak, we actually have 2 right now funnily enough.

But aside from that, thank you that makes alot of sense. Going to forward this all to our letting agency to finally hopefully get an engineer in with all this news. Thank you!!

 

[terryplumb]

Do you use the central heating to come on / off at specific times every day ? If so tell us the times.
If so ,you could latch the zone valve open to DHW cylinder and get hot water.