How to live without heating - save £000s

Green_hopeful

Buffalo is a brand not a fur. 

Alnat1

Brushed cotton PJ bottoms under joggers or looser fitting jeans works well. Was my way of keeping warm on Sunday mornings, watching my son play football.

QrizB

I've got a pair of fleece joggers, and a pair of these for when it's really cold (I rarely need them).

LessImpecunious

HertsLad said:

givememoney said:

Max68 said:

Taking an interest in this thread after a mate told me this morning, he put his heating on or half an hour, looked at his smart meter after 30 minutes and it had cost him £1.40 for half an hour!!

I realise this has been covered many times before, but some heating expert went against the trend and said we SHOULD leave heating on low it will cost less providing our home is properly insulated.

I couldn't disagree more, unless you leave it on at about 12C. Even then, it will almost certainly cost less to turn the heating off overnight. I assume the heating engineer hopes more boiler use will hopefully lead to more service work and a shorter replacement interval.

I've found the Heat Geek website and it's linked videos a good source of info on all aspects of tweaking your heating to save money and heat more efficiently (https://www.heatgeek.com/). According to them, whether it's better to leave heating on permanently or semi-permanently depends on the type of house you live in and its thermal mass - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGs_biFA87Q for this topic; though I had to watch it more than once plus several other videos on related topics before I had any proper grasp of what they were talking about - despite initial appearances they are really quite technical and seem to make sense... They say that, although it might cost as much or slightly more to keep heating on permanently at a low level compared to a hot blast morning and evening, a high thermal mass space (e.g., with thick stone walls) will be more comfortable overall - something I'm testing out currently in our house, where in the past, leaving it for a day or two without any heating in cold weather has required several days with heating on for most of the day to get back up to a reasonable temperature...

Spies

What would be a good starting point to test? Turn boiler flow temp down quite low and put the setback 1 degree less than the comfort temp?

I currently have my setback 3c lower.

Edit: I've turned my boiler down to 3 from 4.5 and I've put my set back up [1 degree] to 17c, 18c between 8 and 10am then 19c between 5:30 and 9pm, will report back tomorrow with the results. 

LessImpecunious

Spies said:

What would be a good starting point to test? Turn boiler flow temp down quite low and put the setback 1 degree less than the comfort temp?

I currently have my setback 3c lower.

Edit: I've turned my boiler down to 3 from 4.5 and I've put my set back up [1 degree] to 17c, 18c between 8 and 10am then 19c between 5:30 and 9pm, will report back tomorrow with the results. 

I've had boiler flow temp at setting of 1.5 since early Nov, so rads are only lukewarm most of the time; have not bothered with setback (after experimenting with turning down manually in the evening for a few days) because I don't have a programmable thermostat, only an analogue one which varies by c. a degree in each direction from when it clicks on to when it clicks off, so I only have a rough estimate of what it's actually set at at any one time -  just leaving it untouched at the moment. In the mild/warm spell of last week (only relative here - we were getting daytime max of maybe 14 or 15, nothing like the 19+ of some places) the heating was turning itself off at times, but since then has been more-or-less permanently on. We're on an LPG tank, so no meter to read, only a very small dial on the tank marked at every 5%, and not convinced that is very accurate anyhow - so am monitoring it every 2-4 weeks. Think we will use c 10% of a tank through November; whereas in previous years at a flow temp setting of c. 4 and heating on intermittently (up to 14 hours a day, split between morning and evening) we would use between 1/8 and 1/4 of a tank in a cold month. Min temps inside overnight (in a cool spot - we don't have rads everywhere, and heat some spaces with a woodburner - rarely lit yet this year - if we did I think the tested method would be more beneficial!) have not dropped below c. 15.5, whereas last year with similar outdoor temps they would drop below 14. So at the moment the test result is looking fairly positive...but may have to turn the flow temp up if we have a long cold spell.

Spies

The results of my test are that I used a fraction more [around 1%] gas today than yesterday by having the fallback at 17c but boiler flow temp turned down.

So for clarification, yesterday fallback was 16c which it fell to by 9am then heat up to 18c all day until 5pm then 19c until 9pm

= 46.6kWh

Today was 17c fallback, 18c between 8am and 10am, then 19c between 5:30pm and 9pm

= 47.1kWh

However the flow temp was too low to hit the 19c set point in 2.5 hours of heating so I've nudged the flow up and will try again tomorrow. 

HertsLad

Markc0011 said:

I'm wondering about trousers. You got jumpers made of wool and acrylic or whatever, but jeans doesn't seem to cut it. Thermals work to an extent, just wondering what are naturally warm trousers.

As I mentioned in earlier posts, once the temperature drops much below 8C, I wear down insulated trousers, in between 2 layers of long john thermals and a pair of jeans. A few days ago, when the temperature fell to about 9C in my house, my hands started to get cold, early one morning. As I have also said before, that's not a time to start wearing any kind of gloves but signals the need to wear more on my body, especially my legs.  I was already wearing two layers of base thermals and a polyester lined jacket from Decathlon. As I don't know where I stored my down filled trousers after last winter, I decided to increase the insulation above the waist, instead. So I added a second polyester lined jacket and that's what I am wearing right now, to feel perfectly warm again.

hardergamer

HertsLad said:

Markc0011 said:

I'm wondering about trousers. You got jumpers made of wool and acrylic or whatever, but jeans doesn't seem to cut it. Thermals work to an extent, just wondering what are naturally warm trousers.

As I mentioned in earlier posts, once the temperature drops much below 8C, I wear down insulated trousers, in between 2 layers of long john thermals and a pair of jeans. A few days ago, when the temperature fell to about 9C in my house, my hands started to get cold, early one morning. As I have also said before, that's not a time to start wearing any kind of gloves but signals the need to wear more on my body, especially my legs.  I was already wearing two layers of base thermals and a polyester lined jacket from Decathlon. As I don't know where I stored my down filled trousers after last winter, I decided to increase the insulation above the waist, instead. So I added a second polyester lined jacket and that's what I am wearing right now, to feel perfectly warm again.

I'm amazed it gets that cold in your home, I'm lucky as I haven't had the heating on yet and my home is still 21C, but I am at the southern tip of the UK Lat50, and it is 16C outside right now and about 12C at night, and I think I get free heat from my neighbours too...

Just so you know I have found much helpful info reading every post in both of your threads, as I am trying to do something simmer as you, I have put up my own ground mounted DIY solar system in my garden, which at first was only to charge my ebike/e-motorcycle, but have found I can power my whole flat apart from the fridge freezer.

But I'm doing this as I have very little choice as I'm disabled and live on next to know money (£120 a week).

EssexHebridean

@hardergamer I believe Hertslad has indicated before that his home is very poorly insulated - indeed the fact that it drops to 2 degrees on occasions seems to indicate that it must be the case. With no heating at all, our ground floor solid walled construction (and concrete floored) flat generally sits around 8 - 10 degrees above the outside temperature in the winter months. In fact, since we had new windows and doors installed a few years ago, I suspect that the lower end of that range would be a little too low. Up until the past few days the coldest weather we've had locally (just in the next county to Hertslad) this autumn had been a couple of early mornings at 5/6 degrees - at the flat was still sitting comfortably at 18 degrees and above at that stage. I was surprised when Hertslad said previously how cold his home was as it was literally a degree or so above the coldest temperatures we'd had in the area, night or day, the only way our place would get that cold would be if I opened all the windows! 

It's great that you are so much warmer down there though - that's got to be a huge help with the heating bills!