Saving on gas and electricity

[watervole]

 A friend changed energy supplier recently, which she reckons will save around £600 a year.

Our energy bill (including both gas and electric) last year was under £600...

Admittedly, we're in the south and she's in Yorkshire, which will make a difference to the heating costs, and we're a mid-terrace which also helps.

However, if anyone wants Judith's tips on saving energy costs, here's a few:

1.  Never do laundry unless necessary.  Wash clothes when they either look dirty, or a quick sniff says they need a wash even if they don't look dirty.  I was horrified by one friend (who was flat broke) who washed her son's trousers every single day.  I find that trousers are often good for a fortnight or more.

2.  Check your loft insulation.  Most people erroneously think they have enough - they're usually nowhere near.  The recommended depth is 10 inches or 25 cm.
Even we probably don't have that much, but the frost melts last on our roof, so we certainly have more insulation than the rest of the street.  If you run out of space between the floor rafters, you can still add it between the rafters under your tiles (which is what we did).  It's easy and cheap and makes the whole house warmer.

3.  Showers cost money.  There's a perception that showers are cheap, but most people spend so long in the shower that it still works out expensive.  Washing just the essential bits with a flannel (or sponge) and a bowl of water will cost a lot less.  (I love my bidet)  If you have clothing due to go in the laundry, use that to wipe under the arm-pits - that often removes the need for a wash.

Basically, heating anything is expensive.

Comments

[damerell]

Presently, my top tip is "arrange to have had no hot water supply since May through a combination of gas main work and the landlord's preferred boiler-fixers being totally incompetent". I should think my gas bill this quarter will be about thruppence. :-/

[xenaclone.livejournal.com]

Also, you can put your washing machine on a timer and do the load at night on a cheaper tariff.

Shower with a friend [GGG]

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I've got solar panels, so I do laundry when the sun is shining. Also good for drying on the line as well.

[sweetheartwhale.livejournal.com]

I went back to line drying when the tumble dryer broke down in May and replacing it would have eaten into the con budget. Now I wouldn't go back to using a dryer. The weather isn't so rubbish here that you can't dry clothes with a bit of pateince and planning ahead in case of emergency eg non ready work clothes, Febreeze can be used to get another day's wear out of something.

Theres also something realy nice and carefree about washing blowing in the breeze and its smells nice - I hate detergents and softeners and cant use them because I have chemical allergies, so my "fresh breeze" clothes smell is exactly that - fresh air, from outside.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean, I love the smell of line-dried clothes.
I gave my tumbler away to an old lady with arthritis who could no longer handle clothes pegs - don't miss it at all.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, we stopped using ours a couple of years ago but kept it for a while 'in case of emergency' -- eventually it became clear there were no such emergencies that couldn't be dealt with in other ways, so we gave it away. Freed up some much-needed space as well as clearing our consciences slightly!

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is good! We also have the energy prices higher and higher...I actually do everything you say and I have even bought several LED bulbs that give pleasant light, they start immediately and save evergy more than old energy saving bulbs.But they are very expensive. However they explained the advatages of LED bulbs in the shop very professionally and before I bough the bulbs, I provided them with information about the lights and rooms and they counted all the parametres and then chose the suitable kind of a bulb for my two most occupied rooms: kitchen and hall. I don´t regret this, the electricity bill showed the difference ( not much after a half year but still).

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I'm going over to LEDs gradually. They should last a very long time.

[gaspode.livejournal.com]

The real real advantage (if you have power surge issues) with LED bulbs is they don't blow with power surges. For us this makes such a difference.

[eledonecirrhosa.livejournal.com]

I recently discovered that the loft insulation in our flats isn't actually insulating ANYTHING. When the flats were built, the builders obviously took the insulating boards up into the loft, neatly stacked them against the wall, and buggered off home. The boards have apparently been sitting there waiting for someone to lay them since 1990! Hopefully a bloke is coming round this afternoon to fix that! And I'm getting nice thick modern insulation as well.

Oh and my summer gas bill consisted of THREE TIMES the volume of gas I used last summer. Turns out the new boiler has this pointless function of keeping a bucket's worth of water constantly at scalding temperature, so you don't have to wait a whole 10 seconds for the hot tap to run hot. I have now switched it onto "eco", which is the "only heat water when I turn on the hot tap" method of running the boiler. Like Ye Olde Fashioned boiler used to do. Would have been nice if the guy had explained those settings to me when he installed the boiler...

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Heaven save us from 'features'!

[sweetheartwhale.livejournal.com]

Yep, we've swopped on to using the gas to heat up the hot water when needed rather than leaving on the electric immerser. It was a bit of a wrench cos I am a "Bath NOW" person, especially after day job work shifts if there the rotation in hot/smelling of cooked food places rather than sat at a desk, but as Watervole says, you can always wash in the sink...

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I'm the one who saved £600 by changing energy suppliers from edf to Scottish Power. My projected bill for gas and electricity combined (from edf) was in the region of £4,300 for the coming year. We do have a biggish old house and we work from home so we heat it throughout the day and part of the night (as I'm often up until 4.00 a.m., though we don't have the thermostats up high. We also light it all day as my north-facing office is too dark to work in without and the kitchen is fairly dark. We've probably also got an inefficient central heating boiler, since it's 25 years old, but replacing it would only save us about £300 a year (Gas Board estimate) and would cost in the region of £4,000 - £5,000 (one estimate from the British Gas was £8,000) and the expected lifespan of a new boiler is now, apparently, only ten years. They don't make 'em like they used to.

Yes we have insulation (+ thick stone walls), energy saving bulbs, a one-cup water heater (though BB still uses the kettle (with too much water) for a single cuppa, much to my annoyance) and thermostatic radiator valves. But we are 1000 feet above sea level on the edge of the Pennines and when the wind blows it gets COLD. We had the heating on well into June this year, though for preference we like to turn it to hot-water-only towards the end of May and leave it off until early October - but some years that's just not possible. I actually had a hot water bottle in bed last night for the first time since the heatwave.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

We're at home all day as well (unemployment...), though we're luckier on daylight than you.

I imagine the colder weather accounts for a lot of the difference, but I suspect it's still worth checking how much loft insulation you have.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I think we're fairly well topped up on loft insulation. We had it done a few years ago. We have 4 sparate loft spaces and 2 of them are floored. The snow doesn't depart our roof any faster that any of the others on the street. We do have eleven rooms, though, seven of them in regular use including the studio and my office, and two of the others (the old shop) are store rooms with a radiator in there on a frost-stat. I suspect it cuts in regularly in the winter. Without it the room gets too dank to use for storage because it has thick stone walls and stone floors and isn't generally lived in. Two big chest freezers (mine and Mum's) add moisture to the atmosphere so it takes a dehumidifier and a radiator to keep it dry. It's this sort of house. Not cheap to heat.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I wonder if there's any other way of keeping the damp out?

Not that I can think of anything immediately, but I do wonder if some of the damp is coming in from the outside. (I can't see how a freezer could add moisture to the air)

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Fridges and freezers do give off moisture. In a house that's used regularly with a reasonable through draft it evaporates easily. In a closed room with a stone floor it can linger. The building is 200 years old, with walls 2 ft thick of stone with rubble infill. It's not sopping wet, just generally a bit on the dank side without heating. Essentially it's a cave. There's no damp proof course because - hey - 200 years old, but if lived in regularly there's no real problem with damp. The rest of the house is fine and built in exactly the same way. But these two rooms used to be the old shop. They've not been used regularly for anything but storing stuff for 12 years. They've never been centrally heated. We extended our heating system and put 2 radiators in there a few years ago to try and keep the general moisture level down and it works reasonably well, except it means heating a space we don't inhabit regularly. Swings and roundabouts, I'm afraid. Since we don't want the stored stuff to go mouldy, we have background heat through the winter.

[rockwell-666.livejournal.com]

Towards the end of last year, following recommendations from other bikers, I bought some knee-length socks called "Heat Holders" for use on the bike.

Not long after the really cold weather started, I was sitting at home on a Wednesday evening dressed only in a thick towelling dressing gown and a pair of these socks and realised that a) it was 9pm in the evening and b) the previous week I'd reset the central heating timer to come on late on the Wednesday because I was going to be out earlier and hadn't reset it.

Because the socks were keeping my feet warm I wasn't feeling cold, so from then on I only ran the heating to warm the bathroom so I could have a shower after I got up and left it off the rest of the time, saving a lot of expenditure on gas.

[sweetheartwhale.livejournal.com]

Dave- Lonemagpie- is the guru of "put on a sweater and tell me if you're still cold, then I'll put on the heating". This comes of growing up in Scotland in a house that didn't have central heating. But you can manage. 2008-nine winter and some of 10-11 we switched off the heating for financial considerations and we survived right through the terrible snows. Admittedly wearing thermals indoors, but we survived ;-) After a bit you just get used to outside temperature not being much different to inside and the kitchen becomes a focus when its cooking a stew, or casserole, or bread in the nice warm oven.