The cost of smokers in the holiday cottage

Our holiday cottage has been closed to guests since March 2020 as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic. It's a gap of four months during which there's been no heating running and no other electric machinery or lights. The latest power bill has arrived showing no reduction in cost.

Back at the end of 2019 and through January 2020 we had a pair of guests stay who were heavy smokers who largely ignored the "no smoking" rule inside the cottage. The costs of remediating this are described elsewhere, but during their stay we had three occasions to visit the home during the stay. On each occasion we noticed the heating was on full blast but the windows and the back door was also wide open, even though it was the middle of winter. Their efforts to attempt to hide their smoking inside the cottage have cost us dearly in terms of additional power usage, in effect the equivalent to four month's worth of additional usage. Using the average cost per week of power (£14.77) this amounts to a figure in the region of £250.

Hooray, good guests!

We had some great guests staying in the cottage this week, we'd love to see them stay again. They were polite, and left the cottage in a clean and tidy state. They didn't complain when the gas supply to the cottage was cut off for 24 hours, leaving them with no cooker, central heating or hot showers.

In fact the gas was cut off to most of the houses in Wirksworth. Some for  as long as four days. A water main burst and injected a lot of water into the gas main. Cadent, the gas network company, has had squads of engineers in town turning off the gas in  the houses while they drain the water out of the gas main. Once a section is clear of water they re-visit the houses to turn on the gas and check appliances are safe.

In the case of the holiday cottage, our guests kindly managed the interaction with Cadent.

Sadly we had to turn down a last minute guest booking from Sykes, because we were not sure whether the cottage would have gas or not. It turned out afterwards that Cadent had been able to restore the gas supply on the eve of the proposed booking. So that cost us a week's rental.