Home energy saving tips /ideas...

[Cudzoziemiec]

I remembered I had a 500-tablet tub of Pepto-bismol still mostly unused

You do realise that, in the face of a global Pepto Bismol shortage, you could be sitting on a resource that could pay your winter heating bill?

Hmm, it seems there is. The 500 tub is actually a Walmart Pepto knockoff called Soothe, but I also have a smaller tub of the real deal for special occasions.

I love the epic tubs they have in US pharmacies. I always think to myself, what if – after the fall of civilisation – I get a headache or indigestion? It's not like I'll be popping out over the blistered radioactive, plague-festering hellscape to Boots to buy a pack of sixteen tablets. On this basis, I never knowingly have fewer than 1,000 ibuprofen caplets to hand. The last thing I want at the end of the world is a headache.

That could backfire on you, ian.

Scene: The End of the World
Location: The Pearly Gates
Characters: St Peter, Jesus, Nicholas Devil, ian, 9 billion humans

St Peter: Lo! What is this huge number of people queuing at my gates today? Do they not know it is Wednesday, my official half day? My sorting clerks cannot possibly sort them into the Saved and the Damned today.
Jesus: Do keep up, Pete, it's the End of the Word, innit? Rejoice! For the hour of salvation is at hand! All that stuff. You can retire on a nice fat heavenly pension once this lot's sorted out.
St Peter: Okay, well it's an easy one anyway. I can see at a glance by the way they clutch their heads and stomachs that they all have stinking hangovers. Sinners the lot of them. To Hell with them! Oi, Nick, old bean! This lot are all yours!
Nicholas Devil: Hey hey! More souls to feed my eternal fires! This way, my chickabidees! Don't stand around freezing your arses off, come and get warm with my imps.
Jesus: Steady on, Pete. What about this chap here? The small one with the exceptionally neat coiffure. See how he smiles joyfully and looks around, bright eyed and bushy tailed? Clearly he is the one true saved soul among this filth.
ian: Oh what fun! Soon I'll be sporting with Desdemona and Barbarella and all the firey imps!
St Peter (to ian): Come here! What was your name on Earth?
ian: ian.
St Peter: And what was your profession, occupation or other activity?
ian: I was a tidy-haired thought leader.
St Peter: Wozzat then? Like chief barber or something?
Jesus: It's one of those new jobs they have now. Not actually anything to do with hair at all. They always give them silly names.
ian: ian's not a silly name.
Jesus: It is spelled like that.
ian: Fair cop.
St Peter: Now, ian, I have great news for you. Just walk through this little door and... you're in! Welcome to Heaven! The eternal paradise, green pastures where the lamb may lie down with the lion.
ian: Heaven? You mean I'm not going to Hell? That sucks! I'd promised my soul to the Devil and all. Mind you, I only got 40 quid for it, so I suppose... Anyway, where's the pub?
St Peter: The pub?
ian: Yes, you said the Lamb and Lion.
St Peter: Oh no, that's not a pub. You see the other sections are full, so we've put you in with the Jehovah's Witnesses.

[ian]

I'm pretty sure that regardless of my appearance, I'm on Hell's guest list. I created their Powerpoint deck 'So Now You're Damned' to help with onboarding. What to expect in your first 30 days of eternal torment etc.

[Jasmine]

My fuel direct debit is £69 per month. The £400 government credit for October to March works out about £67 per month. Octopus Energy have told me (via email) that between October and March my direct debit will be £2 per month. Yes, £2 per month.

Yes, I know my credit balance with them will eventually be eroded away due to what I use over
the coming months.

My supplier has put me on a payment holiday as my expected monthly bill is lower than the gov credit. On the other hand, I don't have mains gas, so could quite do with the cash given that Calor have just hoiked up the price of tinned gas.

[Ham]

Serious thought here about how to improve our Victorian semi.

#2 - change our front sashes to slimline double glazed (12mm deep, argon/other gas filled). Units can be bought for about £1,300, not sure about the fitting cost. Uncertain benefit, but 6m² of single pane glass does a lot to cool a room.

I suppose it depends on how big an energy bill you have for that to make financial sense.  My annual bill is far less than that amount and thus I’d never get back the money from such a spend.

Well, given the lack of data it's impossible (at least for me to calculate the financial benefit, instead that would be justified on the grounds of comfort. As matters stand, our front room remains cool while the rest of the house is baking, and has defeated all our attempts to balance.

Slim Glass of Norwich. https://www.slim-glass.co.uk/

They look interesting, they seem to address one of my questions head on (which others have avoided), that is, are there any size limitations for slim double glazing without supports? (ours, at about 1m² are a single pane) It seems, they recommend much smaller sizes, I will have to talk to them and find out why.

[The Family Cyclist]

My fuel direct debit is £69 per month. The £400 government credit for October to March works out about £67 per month. Octopus Energy have told me (via email) that between October and March my direct debit will be £2 per month. Yes, £2 per month.

Yes, I know my credit balance with them will eventually be eroded away due to what I use over
the coming months.

My supplier has put me on a payment holiday as my expected monthly bill is lower than the gov credit. On the other hand, I don't have mains gas, so could quite do with the cash given that Calor have just hoiked up the price of tinned gas.

Are flo gas an option. When i worked selling calor flo gas were much cheaper and iirc if you and your neighbours ordered together they'd reduce price per bottle

[andyoxon]

Just had a look at meter readings etc for the month of Sept 2022, & we've used 50% of Elect (110kw/h) & 30% of gas (150kw/h) compared to Sept 2021, but paid more or less the same due to tariff increases of course.... ~£65/£60.   Remains to be seen how well we do with gas consumption over winter... 

For electric, perhaps one of the main reductions is our oven usage / change of habits, but miniao being here less has been part of this. Doing more cooking on gas hob, but also firing up the oven/grill just to do baguettes/cheese on toast, or brown off a dish has more or less gone. 

PS.  Re. cheese on toast - quick decent toasting of the bread - cheese on & mw for few secs works pretty well.   

[Pickled Onion]

PS.  Re. cheese on toast - quick decent toasting of the bread - cheese on & mw for few secs works pretty well.   

With cheese at around £10/kg and the price of bread soaring, I would hazard that a couple of minutes under the grill is a tiny proportion of the cost of cheese on toast.

[quixoticgeek]

PS.  Re. cheese on toast - quick decent toasting of the bread - cheese on & mw for few secs works pretty well.   

With cheese at around £10/kg and the price of bread soaring, I would hazard that a couple of minutes under the grill is a tiny proportion of the cost of cheese on toast.

I'd also ask: Just how long are you leaving it under the grill? Cheese on toast is one of those dishes that takes about 5mins to make. Even if your grill were 3kw. That's (1/12)*(3*0.34), that's 8.5p. If you did that every day of the year, it would still only be 31 quid. just over 2.5 quid a month.

This comes back to something I've been saying since near the beginning of this thread. Unless it's heating water, or heating space, most of our energy savings are insignificant and only make our quality of life less. Not having cheese on toast once a week to save less than 10p. Unless you're right down in the lower ends of the income scales, is't probably not worth the worry.

And even when it comes to heating water, or heating our rooms, even a 1°C temp drop can drastically effect our quality of life.

J

[andyoxon]

Well done with the Ch-on-T analysis.     Just an example really.  We seem to have cut out most of our oven use anyway, which is the main E use variability (I think). Miniao, is quite a heavy oven user when she's around - currently not & will soon no doubt be basking in lovely warm central heating in uni residence accomodation with all inclusive bills.

ETA.  I'm the sort of person, who flicks the kettle off as soon as it boils - to save a few seconds overboil before auto cut off.

[Kim]

Oven use seems to be the greatest source of day-to-day fluctuation in our electricity consumption, but it's still on par with the fridge or desktop computers.

(Our consumption is dominated by always-on electronics: server/router/switches/APs/fire alarm/alerters/sensors.  The biggest win would be to reduce the power consumption of the server, which will be on the agenda for the next upgrade.  Swapping two 24-port switches for a 48-port switch would help, but is impractical in a rented house.)

[mrcharly-YHT]

Heating water is a serious use of power.

Whether it is a shower, washing clothes, bath or washing up; we use a lot of hot water.

Turning off the immersion heater and using a kettle really brought this home to me. Three very full kettles of water to get enough to wash up. Yes, we have a largish sink.
That is a real pain to do, so we only wash dishes up at most once a day.

Heating is coming on once a day now, so there is a tank of hot water. Even so, I'm restricting the amount of washing up I do.

[Kim]

Yes, other than the number of minutes the boiler was asked to provide central heating (which doesn't account for modulation, or it being preoccupied with producing hot water), I don't have any decent consumption figures for gas, because Octopus.

I do know that using the Pissy Landlord Electric Shower™ while the boiler was broken last week added another 30% or so to our daily electricity consumption.

[Pickled Onion]

Heating water is a serious use of power.

Whether it is a shower, washing clothes, bath or washing up; we use a lot of hot water.

Turning off the immersion heater and using a kettle really brought this home to me. Three very full kettles of water to get enough to wash up. Yes, we have a largish sink.
That is a real pain to do, so we only wash dishes up at most once a day.

Heating is coming on once a day now, so there is a tank of hot water. Even so, I'm restricting the amount of washing up I do.

A washing up bowl is a good investment. Smaller amount of water, less energy to heat it. Plus the water doesn't lose as much heat as directly in the sink.

[quixoticgeek]

Heating water is a serious use of power.

Whether it is a shower, washing clothes, bath or washing up; we use a lot of hot water.

Turning off the immersion heater and using a kettle really brought this home to me. Three very full kettles of water to get enough to wash up. Yes, we have a largish sink.
That is a real pain to do, so we only wash dishes up at most once a day.

Heating is coming on once a day now, so there is a tank of hot water. Even so, I'm restricting the amount of washing up I do.

Sooo.

To take 1l of water from 20°C to 100°c takes 0.091kwh. Which at 34p/kwh is 3p. So if you boil the full contents of your 10l washing up bowl, thats 30p. Except you're not getting your washing up liquid to 100°C. Nor are you getting the water tank upto 100°C. More commonly it's upto about 70°C. Enough to not get legionella. 20°C to 70°C is 0.06kwh. Or 2p per litre. Now if you use a whole 100l tank of water every day, then it's gonna be 2 quid a day. That's gonna add up over a year. But, we don't shower at 70°C. We shower at closer to 38°C (taken as the default setting on many showers...) Heating 1l from 20°C to 38°C is 0.02kwh. Or 0.68p. So rather than looking at the cost of the whole tank, let's look at it as 9l of water per minute (typical shower usage), at 38°C. Then we're at 6p per minute. A five minute shower costs you 31p.

The efficiency of using the kettle to do the washing up comes from the fact you are only heating the water you need, not the full tank. You could maybe get quite a good saving tho by improving your water tank's insulation, and using the element that is half way up the cylinder to just top up the water at the top that you need.

All these numbers assume 100% efficiency for water heating. And the numbers are using the single tariff rate. If you can heat the water at night using the cheaper rate, then it can be quite a bit cheaper. But if you have to top it up during the day, then it will be even more expensive.

J

[mrcharly-YHT]

Thing is, when we were using the immersion, we used the hot water at the sink thoughtlessly. Have a dirty pan? Fill it with hot water and wash straight away.

The hot water used isn't just what went into the pan, it's the pipes from the cylinder down to the kitchen. That's about 2.5 more litres. It adds up.

[ian]

This is all a reminder that God, in her munificence, gave us dishwashers. This reminds me ours needs replacing as it's developed a teenager mode. I didn't hear you telling me to wash up.

Did someone say microwaved cheese, or was that just a bad dream? I think it must have been because that would make absolutely no sense, and if it isn't a criminal offence it should be. Cheese must be grilled to a nice brown shade, the fat oozing into the bread.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Dishwashers might be energy efficient but they are extremely inefficient of space. They also take a long time, requiring a second set of everything that you can use while the first is being washed. And they are noisy too.

[tonyh]

How about two dishwashers, one for waiting-to-be-washed, one clean stuff. Few cupboards needed.

[Canardly]

Our DW has a 29 minute quick wash which has now become the standard mode of operation. You have not highlighted the obvious benefit of having somewhere to hide the dirty pots. 

[andyoxon]

Dishwashers might be energy efficient but they are extremely inefficient of space. They also take a long time, requiring a second set of everything that you can use while the first is being washed. And they are noisy too.

We always dishwash on the 45C / 30-40min cycle.  May require some soaking sometimes...

[phantasmagoriana]

I'd never used a dishwasher until we moved to this flat last year - when we had the kitchen refitted, I was all ready to get the dishwasher ripped out and have extra storage space instead. But I was quickly converted to the ways of dishwasher, and so it remained.

I have a very very bad habit of leaving the tap running when I wash up, so the dishwasher is undoubtedly more efficient anyway...

[ian]

I find letting pots soak in a bowl of foetid water offputting. If I wash anything in the sink, it's under running water.

We mostly wash on a 30ish minute cycle, it's not noisy, it just sloshes like a happy robot in a paddling pool (get out of there, you'll rust!)

Quite often stuff comes straight out of the dishwasher and back into use, since I mostly cook with the same implements and I'm too lazy to put everything back in the cupboards only to take it out again thirty minutes later.

[lissotriton]

The quickest dishwasher cycle may not be the most efficient. Check the specs.

[Cudzoziemiec]

How about two dishwashers, one for waiting-to-be-washed, one clean stuff. Few cupboards needed.

Needs four: one for waiting, one for washing, one for clean, one for best.

[grams]

The two dishwasher plan fails because when it's time to run the second (dirty) one you might not have used all of the stuff from the first (clean) one, and then you end up with two clean dishwashers and nowhere to put dirty stuff.

 The only solution is to have as many dishwashers as you have items.