help with heating and energy costs while on JSA?

chris1973 wrote: »

I'm assuming you dont have babies or little kids around the house (sorry if i'm wrong in this assumption), and that there is only you or you and a partner to worry about and heat?

If this is the case, then forget trying to heat the entire house. I work full time and earn more than JSA, but even so, being single with 1 low income, I struggle to be able to afford to pay for comfortable heating in a 1 bedroom flat!, even to the point where 70% of my heating (when I do have to use it) comes from paraffin. (Yeah, we are slowly heading back to Dickensian times)

Your limited money will stretch far further if you just concentrate on heating you rather than the room / entire house. A 100 watt rated heated throw for example will run continuously on its highest setting for around 10 hours on just 1 unit of Electricity, and believe me, you will be more than warm enough under it on its half setting, even in mid winter.

This is by far the cheapest form of heating - personal heating. Virtually all other forms of Electric space heating are expensive, a two lamp halogen heater will use just under 1 unit an hour, a 2KW convector / fan heater / oil filled heater etc will guzzle 1 unit every 30 minutes!. If your property is badly insulated you may as well just put the heater out in the garden, because effectively trying to heat the air in a badly insulated / draughty room, is partly doing just that!.

Oil CH, as you have found, can be expensive and requires outlay. For now i'd leave that off until you are back in employment, and concentrate on more frugal ways of keeping warm. Putting the cost of the oil on a credit card, at a time when you dont have a good idea of when you could pay it off in full, is essentially a good way of starting the dreaded debt spiral and is a means to ruination, but good luck with that!.

I appreciate that some tasks such as showering and washing in a freezing cold bathroom will need some air space heating, but I personally just run the electric wall heater for 10 minutes in a morning and 10 mins at night for showering and then huddle under the heated throw or Electric Blanket during the evenings watching TV / when I go to bed. My bedroom is in a one hundred year old farmhouse over an unheated and wall-less car port so the room & floor temperature closely mirrors the outside temperature, but thanks to the blanket, i'm never freezing whilst asleep.

Non of these are ideal or luxury living obviously, but show me a compassionate energy company and a cheap tariff! - sadly both of those are well resigned to the history books, and unfortunately saving money and keeping warm on the cheap will take some effort, planning and change to achieve (even for those in employment who feel the cold and pinch of fuel poverty just as much as everybody else), but yes it can be done, and you can remain comfortable in return for a little inconvenience and the example of a heated throw will keep you warm all day for about 12p (assuming 12p / KWH tariff).

Unfortunately, there is no equiv of a cold / heating allowance for healthy single people of working age.