Admitting to wasting lots of energy and only my own greed has driven me to make changes :-(

Michael_Bear

I think like a lot of people in this country (but not on this forum as this forum represents quite money saving people rather than cross-section) I've been not doing obvious things because deep down I obviously don't care enough about environment and amount saved isn't enough to motivate me over my laziness.

For the middle class with a decent amount of financial headroom and above I actually agree prices should have not been capped at 2021 levels (not vulnerable though or those on breadline) as otherwise people like mine behaviour wouldn't change.

Things I've done, which should have been done years ago (moved in Sept 2014).
Internal curtains from internal front single glazed door and internal side single glazed door to utility which haemorrhage heat from hall & kitchen.
Lagging the hot water tank.
Lagging pipes around hot water tank.
Insulating the wooden old style loft hatch.
Insulating (temporary for winter) glass pained door to cold conservatory which will on whole remain closed for next few months.
Bought a second clothes horse and dehumidifier so can dry clothes on there and not on the radiators this winter.
Recaulking some gaps around the window frames and tiny gaps around house (probably barely save anything but cosmetic as well).
Bought a small electric heater (looks like a speaker) so can directly heat the person (my wife as she gets colder first) in lounge rather than whole house.
Turning the thermostat down and set radiators to room not used to frost mode (to be fair these were done last winter).

Anyway, thought the above might help others and also me admitting my selfishness lift some of the guilt.

Any further tips also appreciated.

EssexHebridean

Beware of using the electric heater over your GSH as it is likely to cost more! 

Alnat1

Treat your Mrs to a heated throw, will be much cosier than the electric heater and probably cost less to run. Close all curtains at dusk.

Check the hot water tank. Make sure the thermostat on it is set no higher than 60C (we have ours at 50C) How long is it heated for each day? Can you cut down the time and still have enough hot water? Do you need ANY hot water from the tank? People with dishwashers and electric showers often don't know what the hot water is for but still heat it for hours. A kettle can be boiled to fill a mop bucket, have a shave etc and tank could be boosted manually for 20 minutes if someone wants a bath. We heat for 40 minutes a day, enough for 2 showers and a bit left.

If you have a condensing boiler, try turning down the temperature on the thermostat, often they were set up at 70C but work more efficiently at 55-60C. Your radiators will be a little cooler and take a bit longer to heat the rooms but can be a decent saving. Bear in mind, the hot water tank will only get as hot as the boiler flow temperature.

Good luck with cutting energy use and thank you for helping the planet 

Michael_Bear

Thanks for the advice, much appreciated.

I've reduced the hot water times and will look into the temperatures on boiler and tank. 

Arfa__

Other stuff you can do:

Swap in LED bulbs everywhere (yeah, obvious, you should have done this long ago)

Ditch/upgrade anything that can't take an LED bulb e.g. 12V lights without a low-load transformer.

Remove some bulbs from any pendants with lots of bulbs, see if you can get away with fewer bulbs

Tweak your outside PIR lights to only come on when very dark and only for the minimum time.

Get a watt meter to work out exactly how much electricity each device uses when on standby and in use. Or use your smart meter if you can use it to narrow down the exact usage of a single appliance.

Stuff using more than 1W in standby should be switched off at plug when not in use.

Compare in-use wattage with a newer appliance and do a quick calc to work out the break-even time on a newer appliance.

e.g. our network switch used ~20W, a newer model uses ~9W and cost ~£30 2nd hand, hence paid for itself in just over 1.5yrs and made sense.

Conversely, our old laser printer uses 10W in standby, new model is quoted as 6W, but costs £140, so going to take ~15yrs to break even (on currently electric prices). Hence we've not replaced that, we just switch it off at the plug when not in use. :-)

We had an old Sony TV in the lounge that used 250W in use, our newer and bigger model in the other room only used 70W, so we had a switch around and ditched the old one.

So, get some hard and fast numbers for your stuff, rather than blindly replace/switch off.

Ensure your central heating has had a recent service and is running as efficient as it can be.

Bleed your radiators.

Ensure you have plenty of loft insulation (>270mm). Our house, a  2007 build, only had 160mm up to beams... Sticking 200mm on top has made a huge difference.

Also, pick up some Merino or thermal layers. Normally great for hiking, motorcycling etc, but get into the habit of wearing all the time and you'll not even notice a drop on your thermostat down to 17-18C. Aldi/Lidl often do deals on them, but recently they've just been a mix. Also, check out EDZ and Charles Tyrwtt, they often have some deals on.

When cooking in the oven, plan a few meals/dishes at the same time to use the heat. e.g. chuck in some baked spuds or a pie for a later meal.

Our oven lets you turn off the light inside. As it needs to be heatproof, it's a non-energy-saving 40W bulb, and uses more power than any other light in the house. So we just turn it on when we need to look at food.

Alnat1

The Tapo P110 energy monitor is everyone's best friend on the forum at the moment. Costs about £10. You plug it into the wall then plug whatever appliance you want to check into it.

You can check how much things use in standby pretty quickly, just monitor for a few minutes. 

Dishwashers/washers/tumble dryers can be checked during use and when you thought they were off (ours pulled a few watts 24/7, luckily we have wall switches to turn them off)

Fridges/freezers can be monitored for a few days as they turn on and off. We found our 14 year old American fridge freezer was using almost 900kWh a year, almost a third of our annual electricity!! We have now replaced it with a very efficient upright FF that should use 214kWh/yr. Monitoring over summer showed it was using even less than that.

Michael_Bear

Cheers for the further comments. I think I've been focussing on the gas mainly but it's good to get all electric tips aswell.

I drafted this up (below) which is estimations but better than nothing. The targets are soft (ie really achievable) but we've got our first born arriving next month(ish) so without being proactive everything would have gone up, not come down. (3 bed detached house - EPC E)

victor2

Michael_Bear said:

Cheers for the further comments. I think I've been focussing on the gas mainly but it's good to get all electric tips aswell.

I drafted this up (below) which is estimations but better than nothing. The targets are soft (ie really achievable) but we've got our first born arriving next month(ish) so without being proactive everything would have gone up, not come down. (3 bed detached house - EPC E)

That's pretty good - you've got good figures to work with and can see changes as you go forward.

We are presently looking at a reduction in annual gas usage of 34% and a reduction in electricity usage of 17%, with no real change in our lifestyle. We had a very old American fridge/freezer (over 20 years) which finally died. It was using around 3kWh per day, the new one is around 1kWh, and is actually nicer. Not expecting it to pay for itself, but the way electricity prices are going, it might one day. We also replaced our even older non-condensing boiler with a combi, and got rid of the hot water tank, which we rarely made use of, as we have an electric shower. Central heating has better controls on it now, and if anything, we're more comfortable heat-wise than before.

We are looking at replacing the shower with one fed off the combi boiler, which should running reduce costs further.

Good luck with the new baby. That will inevitably require extra energy!

SAC2334

Alnat1 said:

The Tapo P110 energy monitor is everyone's best friend on the forum at the moment. Costs about £10. You plug it into the wall then plug whatever appliance you want to check into it.

You can check how much things use in standby pretty quickly, just monitor for a few minutes. 

Dishwashers/washers/tumble dryers can be checked during use and when you thought they were off (ours pulled a few watts 24/7, luckily we have wall switches to turn them off)

Fridges/freezers can be monitored for a few days as they turn on and off. We found our 14 year old American fridge freezer was using almost 900kWh a year, almost a third of our annual electricity!! We have now replaced it with a very efficient upright FF that should use 214kWh/yr. Monitoring over summer showed it was using even less than that.

Do you know if the Tapo P110 will actually register very low wattages .Standby s on TV s and set top boxes are usually very low nowadays .I have a 10 year old plasma as a second TV and would like to know its true standby usage and the Youview box too. 

BooJewels

SAC2334 said:

Alnat1 said:

The Tapo P110 energy monitor is everyone's best friend on the forum at the moment. Costs about £10. You plug it into the wall then plug whatever appliance you want to check into it.

You can check how much things use in standby pretty quickly, just monitor for a few minutes. 

Dishwashers/washers/tumble dryers can be checked during use and when you thought they were off (ours pulled a few watts 24/7, luckily we have wall switches to turn them off)

Fridges/freezers can be monitored for a few days as they turn on and off. We found our 14 year old American fridge freezer was using almost 900kWh a year, almost a third of our annual electricity!! We have now replaced it with a very efficient upright FF that should use 214kWh/yr. Monitoring over summer showed it was using even less than that.

Do you know if the Tapo P110 will actually register very low wattages .Standby s on TV s and set top boxes are usually very low nowadays .I have a 10 year old plasma as a second TV and would like to know its true standby usage and the Youview box too. 

It will do now, there was a very recent firmware update and they now show consumption down to single Watt hours - it had been 0.1kWh increments in the previous incarnation.  The power draw itself goes down to tenths of a watt.

Alnat1

Our Youview box was using 8w on standby if I remember rightly, we now turn it off most night, just occasionally leave it on to do updates in the early hours.

TV sound system was a bigger user than expected, both in use and standby. It's now in a box in the loft