Home energy saving tips /ideas...

[Kim]

Except means testing always serves as a barrier to the people who need it the most.

Perhaps some sort of system based on your overall energy use could have been fairer, but while the heavy users are overwhelmingly going to be richer, there will be some exceptions.

Obviously a better approach would be to stop mucking about with people's electricity bills and do it through the tax system instead.

[quixoticgeek]

I think not means testing the subsidies was a mistake.  Both BEIS and the energy suppliers said it couldn’t be delivered in time.  As I have mentioned I have been receiving the £400 credit despite the fact that I fixed my energy tariff at the end of 2021 and I can afford to pay my bills.  This seems daft.  I did think, with 6 months to work on it, a fairer system would be brought in but it seems that’s not going to happen.

As much as it pains me to say it, I think the non means tested setup is the right approach. Means testing will take too long, and it will create too many edge cases. We've seen how bad many government subsidy schemes are, look at how many people don't get the cycle to work scheme cos they fell through the edge case cracks. Or the difficulty people have had getting home energy improvement funding from the government.

While there are some people like yourself who really don't need it, there's far more people who might have missed out if the payment was means tested. Better to help everyone, rather than mess around trying to make sure only the deserving get it.

J

[quixoticgeek]

Obviously a better approach would be to stop mucking about with people's electricity bills and do it through the tax system instead.

Or better yet. Give everyone the 400 quid, but also tax the energy companies like BP and shell everything they made over the first billion.

J

[Pickled Onion]

I think not means testing the subsidies was a mistake.  Both BEIS and the energy suppliers said it couldn’t be delivered in time.  As I have mentioned I have been receiving the £400 credit despite the fact that I fixed my energy tariff at the end of 2021 and I can afford to pay my bills.  This seems daft.  I did think, with 6 months to work on it, a fairer system would be brought in but it seems that’s not going to happen.

As much as it pains me to say it, I think the non means tested setup is the right approach. Means testing will take too long, and it will create too many edge cases. We've seen how bad many government subsidy schemes are, look at how many people don't get the cycle to work scheme cos they fell through the edge case cracks. Or the difficulty people have had getting home energy improvement funding from the government.

While there are some people like yourself who really don't need it, there's far more people who might have missed out if the payment was means tested. Better to help everyone, rather than mess around trying to make sure only the deserving get it.

J

It doesn't pain me to say that not means-testing for anything is definitely the most equitable way. The low income person gets it for free, the middle income person gets it but pays it back through tax and the high income person pays it back several times over*. It's going to ensure the people who need it, get it, without jumping through hoops, and for all the reasons you and Kim said. It's also way cheaper as you don't have to work out who should get it or chase down people who shouldn't have. This is how the NHS works after all.


*note I said income not "rich" - tax dodges etc. notwithstanding.

[Paul H]

It doesn't pain me to say that not means-testing for anything is definitely the most equitable way.

The point I was making about the poor application of subsidies mainly concerned the Energy Price Guarantee where every unit is subsidised, rather than the £400 discount which most households received.  The price guarantee isn't equitable, the more you use the bigger your discount, while in most cases those in greater need were always likely to be lower users.  Some are being subsidised to heat their swimming pool, run patio heaters, charge the Tesla... while others still can't afford to heat their homes and cook their meals.   A tiered pricing structure, where the first X number of units received a higher subsidy and any usage over that is at full cost, or tapered, would have been equitable and may have discouraged unnecessary consumption.  Those with minimal consumption, often the poorest, would have benefited from the same discount in financial terms which would be a higher proportion of their bills. 
Of course the tax and benefits system should be reformed to redistribute some of the wealth, both from individuals and corporations, but these subsidies were a short term measure brought in to address a specific issue and for many they've failed to do that. 

The low income person gets it for free, the middle income person gets it but pays it back through tax and the high income person pays it back several times over*.

Is there an assumption there that everyone stays in the same bracket?

[quixoticgeek]

Today my flat hit 25.4°C with the heating off.

Why? Cos the sun came out.

As a fluke of the design (I'm pretty sure it wasn't intentional), the south facing windows and the low winter sun work to take advantage of the passive solar gain.

This is the sort of thing I mean when I talk about better designs of buildings.

J

[rogerzilla]

My house self-heats on sunny days but it's a PITA in summer.

[quixoticgeek]

My house self-heats on sunny days but it's a PITA in summer.

Yeah, that's a clear sign that it was not an intended feature. If it was they would have designed it to allow the winter sun in, but blocked the high angle of the summer sun. A brise solai is the fancy name for the architectural feature they would use.

J

[rogerzilla]

The furnace of a conservatory does mean that scavenged wood can be chopped into logs in spring and be ready for burning by autumn.  I cut down a dead eucalyptus and cherry in the front garden and they were at around 0% moisture - too dry really - after summer.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Good for drying clothes too.

[Kim]

An innovation:

After several mechanical fridge thermostats failing over the years, I have replaced it with my own IoS controller out of general spite.  (Usual rules apply: homebrew hardware, homebrew code, runs locally with no Devil's Radio or cloudy nonsense, isolate from mains before removing cover).



I've been tweaking parameters over the last week or so, and I think I've worked the most egregious bugs out of it (the thermostat set itself to NAN°C the other night, which was amusing).

Other than shiny monitoring and kicking up a fuss if someone doesn't close the door properly, the main benefit seems to be that the control loop can be much tighter, with less drastic swings in temperature.  Which, in spite of making an effort to keep the freezer temperature vaguely sane (the old thermostat purely operated on the fridge temperature) and therefore keeping the average fridge temperature a bit lower, seems to result in a modest energy saving, presumably because the compressor isn't chugging away against diminishing returns to get the temperature low enough to switch off.  (It's also saving about 3 watts overall by not constantly heating the thermostat with a power resistor.)

I'm also expecting vastly improved long-term stability against weather changes, because it's measuring the absolute temperature in degrees SCIENCE with digital band-gap wossnames, not tweaking a springamathing against a bimetallic strip with a knob calibrated in whatever the refrigeration equivalent of gas marks is, which gets knocked every time barakta puts the sweet chilli sauce back on the top shelf.


(New controller put into operation on the 10th)

The other thing, which I did strictly as an experiment (our electricity tariff is a flat rate) was to see if adjusting the setpoint of the thermostat according to the real-time price of electrons^[1] (=> the load on the grid) was practical.  It seems to work reasonably well, cooling down by an extra couple of degrees overnight and in the early afternoon, so it can keep the compressor mostly off and allow the temperature to rise slightly during peak times, maintaining a reasonable average temperature...


(Graph from the controller itself: The lines are hopefully self-explanatory.  The shaded blue areas are when the compressor is running.  The blue dots at the top are the fridge door being opened, and the green dots are fetching electricity price data.  There would be red dots if someone had opened the freezer.)

A follow on from this, since I'd included a power monitor, was the ability to switch off automatically if the supply voltage drops too low.  Because the students are back and the local substation needs all the help it can get.

In summary: Mechanical thermostats are rubbish.  There's at least one good reason to connect your fridge to the internet.  No I wouldn't buy one that did.


_{[1] Obtained from the Octopus API for one of the Agile tariffs.}

[road-runner]

Kim, I didn't think I could be more impressed by your technical know-how but you have just upped my esteem of your abilities to somewhere off the scale. Very well done!

[Kim]

Yeah, well, I didn't mention the bit where I got the pinout for all the transistors wrong, necessitating fitting them upside-down and rotated by 120°, using solder-blob technology      

[Snakehips]

Kim, I didn't think I could be more impressed by your technical know-how but you have just upped my esteem of your abilities to somewhere off the scale. Very well done!

Agreed. Even with the frank admission about the use of solder blobs.

[Kim]

I don't think I'm particularly good at any of this stuff, my main skill is that I'm a cynic about reliability and stubborn enough to actually finish projects.

[Pickled Onion]

I don't think I'm particularly good at any of this stuff,

Oh, you are. That's both amazing and useful.

I remember being incredibly disappointed when I bought a posh fridge with digital display to find out the temperatures it displayed were nothing to do with the actual temperatures in the fridge or freezer, just a vague aspiration of the thermostat. A box of tricks like yours would be a fairly minimal addition in a high end fridge but I don't see it happening any time soon.

A follow on from this, since I'd included a power monitor, was the ability to switch off automatically if the supply voltage drops too low.

My current low-tech ancient 12V fridge does this, then flashes a blinkenlight for the next couple of days to say that it's done so. Which confused me no end until I found the model number and goooogled the instructions. Now I know to switch off the fridge before hoovering (again, ancient hoover, 1200W, not battery-friendly).

[Cudzoziemiec]

I think we've had the heating on more this winter than last, because with the new (but still minimal) insulation, it actually makes a difference.

It seems this is an example of the Jevons paradox:

In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use increases its demand, increasing, rather than reducing, resource use.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[fruitcake]

I don't think I'm particularly good at any of this stuff...

I think that's interesting. To those of us who can't do this stuff, those who can do it seem very good at this kind of thing. But then, they would, wouldn't they. And to those who can do this stuff, the stuff they've done doesn't seem difficult, because they can do it. Which may show we're rarely the best judge of our own capabilities. (Don't get me started on those questionnaires that ask people to assess their personal attributes. I'm looking at you, HR departments.)

I reckon the only thing approaching a 'benchmark' for our own capability is when we're bemused at most people's inability to do tasks that seem really easy, because only then do we realise we have a high level capability or an aptitude for that kind of task.

[Kim]

I don't think I'm particularly good at any of this stuff...

I think that's interesting. To those of us who can't do this stuff, those who can do it seem very good at this kind of stuff. But then, they would. And to those who can do this stuff, none of it seems difficult, because they can do it.

Dunning-Kruger effect, I suppose.  I know enough about  a) programming  and  b) hardware  to know that I'm really not 1337.  But elegance is secondary to reliability, and it's easy to build over-engineered one-off pieces of hardware when you aren't optimising for cost, ease of manufacture^[1] or whatever compliance.


_{[1] Not strictly true, of course.  Using off-the-shelf modules for, say, power supplies or network interfaces is a different kind of optimisation that makes sense in small volumes.  Similarly, choice of connectors to avoid having to drill square holes is important when you're making panels by hand.}

[T42]

I don't think I'm particularly good at any of this stuff, my main skill is that I'm a cynic about reliability and stubborn enough to actually finish projects.

Healthy engineer's approach. Hat off.

[fruitcake]

Awesome proof of concept though, Kim, not least because it shows how poorly controlled fridges are currently. And so many of them don't stay at the 1 to 5 C range they're meant to, at least not at the top shelf _and_ the bottom shelf. (Frozen cucumber, anyone?)

On the subject of fridge design, I've always wondered why they are side loading rather than top loading. We know chest freezers are more efficient. Will I be able to buy a chest fridge in future?

[Cudzoziemiec]

I expect that's to do with access given they're usually installed cupboard-fashion.

[fruitcake]

I could imagine a chest fridge as a stand alone unit beside a kitchen worktop, or an integrated version with a section of worktop on the lid. And I can just about imagine refrigerated drawers beneath worktops. 

[robgul]

I could imagine a chest fridge as a stand alone unit beside a kitchen worktop, or an integrated version with a section of worktop on the lid. And I can just about imagine refrigerated drawers beneath worktops.

Refrigerated drawers in kitchen cabinets are a thing, and have been for quite a while . . .  but not sure how effective they are with seals etc?

[Cudzoziemiec]

Presumably it's more efficient to refrigerate one area of 2n m³ than two areas of n m³? Plus, separate drawers won't cope very well with irregularly shaped items. How that stacks up against lower losses from opening just one drawer (assuming you get the right one!) rather than the whole fridge-sized door, I won't even begin to guess.