Metered CL

Yes, they said they could supply change, but had gone on holiday leaving the son in charge.

We had 5 x£1 coins, which we reckoned should do, but the meter rejected one of them.  Took my £10 note to the house but the son only had £5 of change, which he gave me, then he came next day with another £5.

I expect they do just "recycle" the coins from the meters, would be sensible.

If it’s a coin meter, it’s quite simple. The owners will probably empty the meters at least every couple of days, just ask them to give you coins back for paper money. We used to use farm sites that had things like hot water, wash machines, etc… on meters in the 1980’s, and they always had lots of change. They would probably prefer to have the paper money to bank at some point as well. So long as you take a fivers worth of £1 initially, then you should be fine.👍

Just been on a CL with metered electric. Because of the very high unit cost I decided that we would use gas for water heating twice a day and electric for everything else. The daily electric consumption was 5kWh. At this particular CL the cost was £5.25 per day. Gas usage isn’t known yet but I started the week with 4kg of gas and it’s still going strong 8 days later so it appears to be a very cost effective regime when electric is metered.

On top of the electric was a pitch price of £18.00 so £23.25 per day. For this there was a serviced pitch, free wifi and a satellite tv hookup.

Do you mean it was metered at £1.05 per KWh?

If you are heating water for showers and washing up then, in this spell of weather, try the ECO setting of 40 deg C rather than the HOT (60 deg C). This should save a fair bit of gas and still be plenty hot enough for a couple for showers...

agree with ET...£1.05 per kWh seems high? most of our metering has been around a third of that cost.

When we have used metered electric our allowance has been 4 KwH per day.

We use the fridge, charger, TV, microwave, Remoska and kettle on mains. No water or heating used as this was in Spain and not needed.

All showers and washing up done at facilities.

Out of 3 sites used on meters we have only gone over by 1kwh on one site at a cost of 50p.

We now have a bigger battery and in conjuction with the solar panel we anticipate we will be able to be off grid more often, we have a 26ltr underslung LPG tank so plenty of gas to play with, an outdoor gas bbq point will help keep the heat from cooking out of the van.

Looking forward to our next venture away. 

Exactly so.

The allowance each day was 15kwh. This was paid for “up front” but with a promise of a refund for any unused allowance. This made the total pitch price £33.25 per night. I was told this was average for Cornwall at this time of the year. Whether that was true I don’t know. I had always expected a refund as I knew what power we had used at other metered sites and being in June I didn’t expect a high usage. At the end of the week I got a refund of over £70.00 so a total pitch price of £23.25 which was far mor acceptable even with the addition of the cost of the gas.

Now that we are back I have calculated the gas cost. For the whole of the two weeks that we were away we used 3kg gas = £12.00 (November 2022 price). This was for cooking an evening meal every night and water heating twice per day for the first 7 days. This obviously worked out a lot cheaper than paying the £1.05 per kWh for electric the first week.

The second week was all inclusive at £25.00 per night so gas usage was for cooking only. Serviced hardstanding pitch, unrestricted electric included, free very strong wifi, very good and clean shower / toilet, (wet-room) neatly cut grass and generally a very well maintained site. Probably the best CL that we have been to out of the 51 different CLs that we have stayed at.

We stayed at Skybarn Farm, near Lincoln in March of this year and they had just introduced metered electricity. Since it was our first experience of metering, I was interested to see how we would get on. Pitch fees had been reduced from £25 down to £20 to compensate for the electricity charges.

Firstly - it was cold!  Down to -5 degrees on the first night. We used the van as we normally would and I have to admit it's quite a power hungry van. Heating, water heating, heated towel rail (600w), small plug in fan heater (500w) in bathroom for 10-15 minutes in the morning, large fridge and freezer - all running from electricity.  We used just over £10 worth in the first 24 hours!  (Charged at 37p per unit)

It certainly brought it home to me why it had been necessary to introduce metered electricity if the CL was to survive.

Thereafter I ran the heating and hot water on gas and the average daily electricity cost dropped to just over £5 and I'm guessing we used about £5 to £7 worth of gas (Safefill) during the following six days.

So - all in all - only a slight increase in overall costs.