Over the weekend, Daugavpils residents received electronic bills (they are sent earlier than paper bills) for heating. Since the beginning of October, Daugavpils has had one of the lowest heating tariffs in the country – 63.12 EUR/MWh, but heating bills are different. The reason for this is that a heating tariff is not the same as a heating fee.
Namely, the heating tariff is only one of the components of the heating payment. The second is weather conditions. The colder it is outside, the more you will need to pay for heating, because more heat energy is consumed. As the third component of the heating bill, we can mention the settings of the heating unit. Standard settings involve turning off the heating unit at +10C and turning it on at +80C. At the same time, in many apartment buildings there are other parameters for the operation of the heating unit. If people choose, for example, to have their heating unit operate at +120C, then it is obvious that they will pay more for heating than with standard settings.
In addition, in October, when the heating season began, a big role was played by how much the house cooled down before it was connected to heating. The more it managed to cool down, the more the heating unit worked after switching on to warm this house. Accordingly, it consumed more heat energy.
And here we come to another important component of the heating fee – the energy efficiency of the building. Modernized, insulated buildings cool down more slowly, retain heat inside better and therefore consume less heat energy. Accordingly, their residents need to pay less for heating, although the heating tariff is the same for all citizens. It’s just that their house consumes less MWh of heat energy, and each such MWh costs 63.12 EUR, and not a square, cubic meter or a certain time period for heating the building.
Accordingly, if we are talking about the city as a whole, then the tariff is 63.12 EUR/MWh for all central heating consumers, but the average heating fee is 1 m2 in October 2024 – 57 cents. At the same time, residents of large and insulated houses pay less on average, while residents of small and energy-inefficient houses pay more. Apartment owners should look for opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of their homes together with the companies that service their property.
Source: www.gorod.lv
