Working from home - how to avoid excessive gas bill this winter?

TheBanker

Hi,

Like many people, since the pandemic I have spent most of my working week at home. I go into the office normally 1 or 2 days each week. I am looking at ways to minimise gas usage while I'm at home.

A bit of background about my home. I live on my own in a three bedroom house, with gas central heating. When I am working from home, I spend most of the day in a small bedroom which I've converted to an office. In the evenings, and all day at weekends, I spend most of my time in the living room.

I already have Thermostatic Radiator Valves upstairs which I use to good effect. The spare bedroom is not in regular use so it's set to the lowest setting. I don't like my bedroom to be too hot so that's also set to low although I turn it up for a while before bed time if it's particularly cold. I normally have my office bedroom radiator on when I'm working in there, but turn it right down at the end of the day.

My concern is about downstairs where I do not have TRVs, except for the kitchen radiator. I have five radiators without TRVs (two in the lounge, one in the dining room which is open plan to the stairs, one in the downstairs loo and one in the tiny hallway. I am looking for a way to avoid paying to heat these rooms during the daytime when they are not being used. It seems wasteful to run the heating when I really just need to heat the small room where I work. Even in the evenings it seems wasteful to heat the hallway and downstairs loo when I only spend a few minutes in these rooms.

If it makes any difference, I have a wireless thermostat. I already do things like wearing a jumper when it's cold.

So I think my options are:
1. Have TVRs fitted to the downstairs radiators so I can control each room individually. Although I gather you should have one radiator/room without a TRV which is where the thermostat should be placed.
2. Use a small electrical heater to just heat the room I'm working in during the day time.

I think option 1 was involve a higher initial cost, but be the most flexible and provide the greatest ongoing saving.
Option 2 is much easier to implement but may provide no savings at all, in fact it could cost more.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what I should do?

Alnat1

I'd definitely get TRVs downstairs. Take the thermostat to the room you're using and have that TRV on full (for most TRVs that's about 30C!) and other rooms lower. You can adjust themo as needed easily then.

Is it possible for your bedroom to double up as the office, at least Dec-Feb? Don't know your room sizes but if a double bed could be swapped for a single and make more room for a desk, kind of thing?

We have the open dining room/stairs situation and downstairs loo too and were planning not to heat them  much this coming winter, keeping internal doors closed to zone all the other rooms.

Mstty

@Alnat1 Open downstairs loo (very European of you)

[Deleted User]

Get a plumber to fit an automatic bypass valve to your pump and you can fit TRVs to all radiators.

Heating just one room is never as a good an idea as people think. All rooms need to be kept at a reasonable temperature? Why - because our daily activities create bucketloads of moisture. This moisture has to go somewhere and it will condense on the coldest surfaces it can find. After a while, this can lead to damp/mould.

The other consideration is that modern boilers have a modulation ratio. A modern boiler might modulate down from 24kW down to 7kW as the house heats up and heating demand drops. If you are heating just a 1.5kW radiator in one room with the rest turned to the lowest temperature setting, the only thing that the boiler can do is cycle. 

Repeated cycling is not good for the life of modern boilers. It is a bit like repeatedly turning a light switch off and on. You will reduce the life of the bulb and the ultimately the contacts in the light switch will fail.

TheBanker

Alnat1 said:

Is it possible for your bedroom to double up as the office, at least Dec-Feb? Don't know your room sizes but if a double bed could be swapped for a single and make more room for a desk, kind of thing?

It would be possible, but I don't want to do this. One of the issues I had when I started working from home was being able to 'switch off'. At the time I was working in the dining room, so my work equipment and papers were constantly there as a reminder and it was very tempting just to check emails and then start working in the evening.

It's been much better since I set up the office - at the end of the day I power off and close the door. So no reminders of work until I go in there again the following day. 

I think any savings from moving the office into my bedroom would be tiny - at the moment the office is heated during the day, but the bedroom is not. The bedroom is only heated briefly before bedtime, and only if it's particularly cold. By this time the office heater is off and the office has cooled down. Of course, the bedroom may be warm enough due to the heat from the dining room radiator going upstairs so if I turn off the dining room radiator, I might find my bedroom needs a bit more heat. 

elsien

Yes, I’m with you on this one. Converting a bedroom to a home office rather than having everything all over one of the downstairs rooms iwas one of the best decisions I made during lockdown.
I’d also go with the TRVs downstairs.
I do keep my whole house heated to a reasonable  level but the office is a lot warmer during the day than anywhere else. 

pochase

TRVs are also my solution.

This will help you for the next years, while the cost for the electric heater is for just one winter. You would have next year the cost for the electric heating again.

TheBanker

Thanks for replying.

[Deleted User] said:

Heating just one room is never as a good an idea as people think. All rooms need to be kept at a reasonable temperature? Why - because our daily activities create bucketloads of moisture. This moisture has to go somewhere and it will condense on the coldest surfaces it can find. After a while, this can lead to damp/mould.

The other rooms would still be heated, just not as often/as warm. My main aim is to avoid heating the downstairs rooms during the day because they're not being used. In the olden days when I used to go out to work every day, the whole house would be unheated until about 4:30pm. This would be no different.

[Deleted User] said:

The other consideration is that modern boilers have a modulation ratio. A modern boiler might modulate down from 24kW down to 7kW as the house heats up and heating demand drops. If you are heating just a 1.5kW radiator in one room with the rest turned to the lowest temperature setting, the only thing that the boiler can do is cycle. 

Repeated cycling is not good for the life of modern boilers. It is a bit like repeatedly turning a light switch off and on. You will reduce the life of the bulb and the ultimately the contacts in the light switch will fail.

I didn't know about that.

So what's the best thing to do overall? Continue to heat rooms that I'm not using to protect the life of the boiler, or switch the heating off all together and use an electrical heater in the office if I get too cold?

savers_united

I used an oil heater throughout last winter when working from home, just heated the room I was in. This was from 8 until 3ish and then the heating came on at 5, after a full year it did not seem to impact my Elec bill that much (smart meter so accurate), I found it more flexible for me personally, when it was a warmer winters day it may only come on every other hour. If I needed to pop out for lunch or into work I could easily just switch that heater off.

It does not work for everyone and if there were people at home in the day then I would likely opted for the heating on, even with thermostat and TRVs it just felt wasted heating the whole house when I was only using one room,.

I also considered that my Elec tariff was fixed, so per kwh was only 10p difference Gas / Elec. 

thriftytracey

I worked from home two days a week pre retirement (2019).  Even then I did not have the heating on during the daytime.  I worked in the kitchen and had a small portable halogen fire under the kitchen table which was cheaper to run. We also have one in the bathroom. Now, of course we never have the GCH on.  We heat one room via log burning stove and continue to use the halogen heater in the kitchen (it does warm your legs though not so much upper body (used fingerless gloves on really cold days)

Received one lot of logs early July and ordering another lot next week ready for the winter.  Surprisingly the cost hasn't gone up.  Our Winter fuel allowance pays for the logs.  I went on a fix as soon as energy went up the first time - it nearly doubled but at least I have another nine months with no price rises (I hope).

No longer use the two main electric ovens or grill, use Halogen worktop oven and air fryer.  Stopped running hot water tap for rinsing, you can hear the gas firing up immediately from the boiler (and the electric pump of course).  Quite a difficult habit to break.

Swipe

Maybe go into work 4 or 5 days a week over winter if you have a short commute? I can imagine many offices will be much busier this winter.