Gas, electricity and estimated spend

Headline interpretation

The highest-cost and highest-gas period is driven by winter heating. The July-to-July year with the highest gas use is 2024-2025, and the highest estimated spend is also in 2024-2025. Electricity is flatter than gas and has smaller seasonal movement.

Costs are estimates using a single current UK standard-tariff proxy across the full historical period. This is useful for comparing usage patterns and likely scale of spend, but it is not a reconstruction of actual historical bills.

Spend and usage by period

July-to-July years are useful because they keep the main heating season together. Calendar-year totals are included because they are closer to how consumers often think about annual spend.

July-to-July year comparison

Calendar-year comparison

Estimated cost over time

Monthly estimated cost combines gas, electricity and standing charges. It shows the consumer-facing impact of seasonal gas demand.

Gas usage over time

Gas has the strongest seasonal pattern. The weekly clustered chart compares equivalent parts of each July-to-July year side by side, while the monthly chart shows the broader trend.

Top gas weeks

Electricity usage over time

Electricity is comparatively steady. The top weeks matter, but the pattern is less dominated by winter than gas.

Top electricity weeks

Best and worst cost periods

These tables use complete Monday-to-Sunday weeks only, so partial first and last weeks do not distort the ranking.

Method and assumptions

The raw source was Readings-Readings.csv. Each reading was parsed into timestamp, display time, gas reading and electricity reading. Readings before noon were assigned to the same effective date; readings at noon or later were assigned to the next date. Consecutive readings were converted into intervals, and each interval was spread evenly across the calendar days it covered.

Gas conversion used: gas kWh = gas cubic metres × 1.02264 × 39.5 ÷ 3.6. Electricity meter units were treated as electricity kWh. Estimated costs used electricity 0.2467 £/kWh, gas 0.0574 £/kWh, electricity standing charge 0.5721 £/day, and gas standing charge 0.2909 £/day.

No validation notes were found. Missing portions of a year are left blank in charts and are not treated as zero usage.

Data exports

The processed tables are included as CSV files in the dashboard folder.