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

TheBanker

Swipe said:

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.

It's an option - I did go into work more often over the last couple of weeks to enjoy the air conditioning! 

But I don't think it would actually save money overall. I think the petrol would cost more than running the heating all day, even without my proposed efficiency measures. And presumably even though I think the daytime heat is being wasted, there is some benefit as the heating doesn't have to work as hard in the evening as the house is already warm. 

I should add, I can afford to run the heating all day (I know this makes me fortunate because there are a lot of people who will struggle) - my question is more about avoiding unnecessary waste than trying to make ends meet, if that makes sense. 

savers_united

Swipe said:

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.

I can see a lot of smaller businesses adopting something similar, if they only expect half their staff in due to current home working arrangements may decide to only heat / light 50% of the offices to save costs themselves..

A bit of an awkward one for someone who does 4 days at home in the nice warm months and then wants to shift to 4 in work in the cold months, I would not like to lose the privilege of WFH and having a few days at home really work, so for me to suddenly turn around and make a case for 3 days in work would raise a few eyebrows.

Majority of cases I guess the commuting costs would outweigh the cost of staying at home

victor2

The house will be heated by the central heating outside of your "office hours". I had a similar situation several years back and just used a small thermostatically controlled fan heater in the spare room that was my office. The central heating came on for a few hours early morning and then in the evening. It worked, no damp issues, and I soon got used to just running the fan heater for short periods without feeling the cold too much. Cost less than running the CH all day, even with TRVs on most of the radiators. Too much trouble to mess with the TRVs twice a day as compared to just setting the heating timer for twice a day and then leaving it alone. It was an old central heating system with a fixed thermostat in the hallway, so modern systems could possibly be more efficient.

tpeppers

It costs me about £70 a day in train fares to go to the office (approx £45 a day with a monthly season ticket) so it would be cheaper for me to sit at home with all radiators running full blast all day than to go to the office! 

Last winter I bought some secondary glazing film to seal up my home office windows. It made a noticeable difference, even though we already have double glazing. I kept the office door shut with a draft excluder at the bottom, and ran an electric heater to just keep that one room warm. It worked well and I do think our bills came down. Hard to tell though as we only got a smart meter installed last year so can't really compare our consumption. It's what I plan to do again this year if I'm working home alone. 

TheBanker

savers_united said:

Swipe said:

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.

I can see a lot of smaller businesses adopting something similar, if they only expect half their staff in due to current home working arrangements may decide to only heat / light 50% of the offices to save costs themselves..

Yes, I know my own employer saved hundreds of thousands of pounds in energy costs when our offices were completely closed during the lockdowns. They also saved on other costs e.g. less cleaning. Of course this was off-set against the investment in thousands of additional laptops and everything else we needed to be able to work from home.

Now we are back, there are still savings as some floors have been mothballed. But even with the floors we are using, there's plenty of space so I doubt there will be an issue with too many people wanting to work in the office on any particular date. 

[Deleted User]

TheBanker said:

Thanks for replying.

Dolor 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.

Dolor 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?

This is what is meant by the term boiler short cycling. By closing off the size of your heating system, you end up with a similar situation to that of a house with an over-sized boiler:

https://aphplus.co.uk/boiler-short-cycling/

You can reduce short cycling by turning down your boiler flow temperature. If you have a condensing boiler, then a number of installers advocate that no TRVs should be fitted. The reason for this is that a properly specified; installed and balanced heating system should have a flow to return temperature differential of 20C. Boiler efficiency increases when the flow temperature is less than 56C. The lower the flow temperature; the lower the return temperature and the greater the boiler efficiency.



When people go to the extreme of shutting off all their radiators bar one, the boiler return temperature will be pretty close to the flow temperature: that is, there will be negligible efficiency benefit over a standard boiler.  By setting a boiler flow temperature of 50C, then the house will take more time to heat up but the return temperature will be below 56C which results in higher boiler efficiency and less gas usage. 

Finally, the above works well with a combi boiler (you can turn down the flow temperature as low as you like/can live with). System boilers with a HW cylinder require a bit more thought because of the Legionella risk if the HW cylinder is kept at 50C. I get around this by heating my home with gas and using the immersion heater for HW.

Ally_E.

[Deleted User] said:

TheBanker said:

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?

This is what is meant by the term boiler short cycling. By closing off the size of your heating system, you end up with a similar situation to that of a house with an over-sized boiler:

https://aphplus.co.uk/boiler-short-cycling/

You can reduce short cycling by turning down your boiler flow temperature. If you have a condensing boiler, then a number of installers advocate that no TRVs should be fitted. The reason for this is that a properly specified; installed and balanced heating system should have a flow to return temperature differential of 20C. Boiler efficiency increases when the flow temperature is less than 56C. The lower the flow temperature; the lower the return temperature and the greater the boiler efficiency.



When people go to the extreme of shutting off all their radiators bar one, the boiler return temperature will be pretty close to the flow temperature: that is, there will be negligible efficiency benefit over a standard boiler.  By setting a boiler flow temperature of 50C, then the house will take more time to heat up but the return temperature will be below 56C which results in higher boiler efficiency and less gas usage. 

Finally, the above works well with a combi boiler (you can turn down the flow temperature as low as you like/can live with). System boilers with a HW cylinder require a bit more thought because of the Legionella risk if the HW cylinder is kept at 50C. I get around this by heating my home with gas and using the immersion heater for HW.

I have a condensing systems boiler. What I do is switch up the boiler temp to 65C before bed, the hot water timer comes on at 6am and heats the water. I get up at 7am and turn down the boiler temp to 48C and turn the heating on. It's a faff, but it became a part of my evening routine in colder months and I don't mind it too much. 

ariarnia

i agree with victor about considering the thermostatic room heater. before now i've used an oil filled radiator (only about £20 for a small one) to heat one room. its got a thermostat so if the room is warm then i turn the heating off when the kids and OH go out then it only pops on every now and then (which is actually normally just often enough to remind me to go make a cup of tea and stretch my legs
)

macman

The cost of the TRV's is trivial, maybe £12 each, and you can fit them yourself very easily. Ten minutes each?
They'll also save you money outside of office hours with their greater controlability.

adindas

Well it is simple, I would say.

Just do not turn on all of your radiator heaters and used thick sweaters, jacket instead. 

Many people could leave in this way during winter. Just imagine those who are in war-torn countries. But you will certainly need to compromise your comfort.