You could be paying too much for KVA on your electricity bills, but it’s simple to reduce this almost immediately, at any point in your contract.

The amount of KVA you pay on your half-hourly electricity invoice is often overlooked, but this is an area where £1000’s can be saved in many cases.

First off, we need to understand the very basics of what KVA is.  KVA is the acronym for ‘kilo-volt-ampere’.  Put simply the more KVA you have assigned the more power you are likely to consume.  Your local sub-station will only be able to distribute so much to the supplies it is connected to before it is over-loaded, so all larger supplies (half-hourly metered) have an amount of KVA assigned to them.  This amount is not necessarily suitable for the site and is commonly over-estimated. 

KVA is usually charged at a rate per KVA assigned to you, per month.  So let’s take a typical example where you have 500KVA assigned to your supply with the rate being £1.20/KVA;

£1.20 x 500kva = £600.00 per month.  Multiply that over a year and that’s £7,200.

Although KVA charges vary very slightly per supplier, this is only very slightly.  The potential saving is not in the rate being charged by your supplier, but in the amount of KVA you have assigned to you from the distributor.  You may believe there is nothing you can do about this, but the fact is you can apply to have this lowered.

Far too often too much KVA is assigned to a property, usually when a building is constructed or a property changes use.  If we take the example above of 500KVA you may only require 180 of that allotted KVA.  If this were to be the case you could lower the amount of KVA assigned to you by the distributor and pay less each month as a result.

So if we recalculate based on the change to 180KVA; £1.20 x 180kva = £216/month or £2592 per annum.  That’s a saving of over £4,600 per year just from making a simple change.

It is well worth looking into your KVA usage as the savings can be very large.  This is something we would be happy to assist you with at no charge, simply get in touch to discuss on 0800 040 70 90.