Seeking out some more energy efficiency gains, switching to renewables
Can you feel the electricity in the air!?! Cos that’s what we’re talking about today!
We are roughly a year into our relentless quest to optimise our expenses and after a while you do tend to think that you’ve done all there is that you can do. However until I’m living in an energy neutral yurt with complimentary self sustainable organic farm in the Cotswolds, there is clearly still work to be done. Let’s have a quick look at where we are now, and how things could be improved.
The current energy bills picture
Aside from the fact that this winter has been a lot milder, temperature wise at least, than the last, I think we’ve still done a pretty good job of decreasing our energy usage in the flat. There has been no real effort on our part or revolutionary ideas employed aside from the bog standard “top energy saving tips” such as:
- Changing light bulbs to energy efficient CFL ones
- Turning the heating down by 1 degree C
- Turning off a few things we don’t use when they are not in use (e.g. microwave, we have about 10 clocks in the house already and do not need another one!)
- Generally being a bit more conscious of leaving lights and appliances on
Small gains add to worthwhile savings
Our old supplier Atlantic (part of the SSE group) were charging us £52 monthly for gas and £45 for electricity, which admittedly was a bit over the top in the first place, but when we switched and received our final bill they ended up owing us £122 for the electricity and £263 for gas. That leaves us with an actual cost of only around £25 per month for gas and £31 for electricity. Seeing as gas usage drops considerably over the summer it will be interesting to see our next bill from our new supplier, it should be even less than this, but we’ll have to wait a full year of a summer and winter to get a full picture of the costs with them.
Much like our old friend compound interest, it is great to see that all the small optimisations have been adding up to tangible savings, but the main point I really wanted to make with this article is that there is always room for improvement!
Seeking out some extra optimisations
A few spotlight bulbs conked out in our kitchen recently and I realised that we have been using Halogen bulbs for all of our spotlights without realising it. I’m not sure why it has gone unnoticed but I think we basically fell for the old trap of purchasing the cheapest bulbs we could find when we first installed these light arrays. Big mistake!
Anyway I managed to replace 10 bulbs with much more efficient LED ones for around £35 which we should make back in just 4 months according to the fact that they use around 90% less energy than normal lamps. I’ve installed them and they are also nice and bright, and I am hoping will be more reliable than the halogen lamps which have tended to blow fairly regularly. I also sold the remaining lamps I had (11 in total, 8 used and 3 new) for a nice round tenner on a facebook selling group.
Good Energy – switching your electricity to renewables
Some of you may remember my post on switching energy suppliers a while back and I was looking at Woodland Energy Trust, however that brand seems to have been eaten up by OVO energy now. OVO managed to put me off somewhat by the confusing number of tariffs, some of which are marginally cheaper on comparison, but only use 15% renewables, which I thought was a bit pointless. Surely you either support renewables and go in 100% or just want the cheapest provider in which case you choose one of the other guys who are burning a load of irreplaceable fossil fuels to feed your flat screen TVs in every room 😉
Anyway so long story short, I decided to go with Good Energy in the end who offer a simple 100% renewable plan and have a much better customer service record; they have been voted top provider for customer satisfaction in a Which survey three years running in fact! Can’t really argue with that. I’ve had a few emails back and forth so far and can confirm they answered promptly and politely, and resolved any issues I brought up with them more than satisfactorily.
What’s the cost?
In comparison to my old supplier here are the current prices:
| Good Energy | Electricity | Gas |
| Unit price (pence per kWh) | 14.220 p | 4.157 p |
| Standing charge | 17.66 p per day (£64.46 per year) | 22.34 p per day (£81.56 per year) |
| SSE (Atlantic) | Electricity | Gas |
| Unit price (pence per kWh) | 14.564 p | 4.809 p |
| Standing charge | 16.44 p per day (£60.02 per year) | 16.44 p per day (£60.02 per year) |
As you can see, it will probably work out roughly the same for me, plus or minus ten or twenty pounds over the year.
The only slight downside I can see is that I am now on a variable rate so we’ll see how that goes over the next few months. I may end up switching again soon if it goes up too much! Fingers crossed.
Anyway, if you want to do your bit for the planet and potentially save a few pounds, compare your rates to the ones above, and if they look roughly the same or less than your current charges, maybe you should consider switching as well
Have you had success in reducing your energy bills or finding a good alternative to fossil fuel based energy supplies? Let us know about it in the comments! Thanks!
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Our home was build in 1950 and is terribly inefficient. We don’t even have a true attic to insulate. So our bills are crazy high ($100 monthly for electricity, roughly $35 monthly for gas). But I’m hesitant to put much money into the place as we’ll be moving in the next few years. I doubt we’ll see an ROI for many big efficiency changes. What do you think?
I’m going to be ultra helpful and say… it depends 🙂
They have energy saving subsidies over here such as for insulation in your loft and so on, which lowers the cost so it makes it worth doing, but if you have to foot the whole bill then it’s probably not worth it if you are moving soon!
I guess the key is to run some estimated figures and see what it comes out as.
One strange thing is why the electricity is so much more than the gas. Is gas just crazy cheap over there now due to the extra reserves recently discovered, or do you have electric heating/cooling or something like that running most of the time?
Hi again. A couple of comments here :-
a) subsidies for home insulation may be available to certain people in the UK, but if you accept them then you’re tied to using a list of specified suppliers, which are never the cheapest available if you shop around.
Buying the insulation material and installing it yourself will always be cheaper than receiving a small subsidy yet paying someone else way over the odds to provide and install it.
My advice to ‘Done by Forty’ is to do it, because it should proportionally increase the resale value of the home.
b) electricity is more expensive than gas because electricity does not exist naturally (at least not in the form of 220V 50Hz AC – or 110V 60Hz in the USA !), and must therefore be generated from rotating machinery, often by using gas as the fuel to raise steam to drive large generators via turbines.
(You may think of steam power as being rather Victorian, but there are many sound technical, environmental, safety and economic reasons why it’s still universally used in power stations – water has very useful physical properties, not least the ability to absorb and transmit huge amounts of energy with only a relatively small temperature rise – I could expand on this subject, but I don’t want to sound like an engineering text-book !)
The fuel gas has a high ‘calorific heat value’, i.e. the chemical energy available to be released during combustion, but the internal thermal /mechanical / electrical efficiencies of the power stations, plus the energy lost during transmission to the home, means that typically only around 1/3 of that chemical energy contained within the gas can actually be delivered as electrical energy.
And although fuel costs are the biggest costs to the power stations, they’re not the only costs – they’re quite complex systems and there’s a huge amount of money tied up in their construction, plus ‘sustaining capital’ requirements to keep it going, and all the engineers and skilled labour etc needed to operate and maintain it. These days there are also very stringent environmental limits to be met for emissions of combustion by-products, which greatly increase the capital and operating costs.
Therefore, the electrical energy delivered to your home from the gas-fired power station will cost up to around four times as much as the raw gas from which it’s generated.
This is borne out from the costs within the table in your post.
http://eaglesfeartoperch.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/when-less-means-morewhy-electricity.html
Hi DM. Thanks for the in depth reply! Lot’s of useful info in there.
Electricity is of course much more expensive per kWh but it still surprised me that DB40’s bill was so much higher than his gas. Our gas bill is usually around the same price as our electricity one. The main culprit sound like his Air Con unit which (unfortunately?) we don’t have to worry about over here!
The AC runs pretty regularly here in Arizona from April through October, since it’s a desert. And because the home isn’t energy efficient, that bill is higher than it would be normally. But our renters pay half the bill: another factor that keeps me from investing in efficiency measures. They will always foot a portion of the utilities, but pay 0% of improvements. Moral hazard? (Probably a good idea for a blog post).
Ah Arizona! Sorry was not sure what state you are based in. A lovely state indeed if I may say so 🙂
I can see why you are even more reluctant to shell out for the improvements if you are only footing half the costs of the innefficiencies, but yes there is certainly a moral argument there to get it done anyway isn’t there!
Utilities are certainly not my favourite expense as of late! We’ve recently had a ‘meter malfunction’ that resulted in a £600 electricity bill for just 3 months.
Needless to say, I was straight on the phone to EON.
I like the idea of those new Smart Meter’s, will be looking out for deals when we move out of our shared accommodation in a a few months! I’ve hear the Money Saving Expert switching service is quite a good scheme.
That’s no good Joe! Hopefully you got it back quickly.
The Money Saving Expert service is very good yes, I used it when switching over this time and got £30 cashback (although not received it yet!). I think they might be ending that soon or may have already ended it though, due to regulatory reforms in the energy sector (so I hear from Good Energy anyway).
We had to get a new boiler when we added to our 2 bed house 2 extra loft rooms.
For me the best investment when we did this setting up the house with a 2 zone system with a digital time control. I can control the heating in 10 minute increments, so we only have the heating on for precisely the time we need it each day.
We also have a temperature sensor outside on the wall, so the system doesn’t fire up as much if the outside temperature warms up (clever stuff!).
As i only work part time, i’ve made the habit of reading the meters every monday after I’ve dropped the kids at school, so keeping a good handle on usage.
I just had £174 credited back from our supplier (Scottish Power) so the system is working! A warm winter has also helped i’m sure.
Wow that sounds like a pretty awesome system! I am sure in 10 years time we’ll all be living in “smarthouses” that can work out exactly when to turn on and off all our lights, appliances and heating!
Hi again TFS.
I’ve a couple of related posts that may be of interest;
http://eaglesfeartoperch.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/monitoring-electrical-energy-use.html
http://eaglesfeartoperch.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/home-heating-living-with-what-we-have.html
The first is on annual energy usage and costs of major electrical appliances, and the other has a few ways to potentially save on heating bills.
Feel free to check them out – there’s no advertising on my blog site so I don’t gain financially by driving up the visitor count !
Thanks for posting those links DM, they look extremely in depth (which I clealry approve of!) so I’ll check them out tomorrow. Great stuff.
Using that MSE tool I discovered the cheapest green tariff was £200 more expensive. The company I’m with now only has 4 tariffs vs 10+ last time i checked, so seemingly it’s dumped the green ones. I’m fixed until june anyway and i’ll probably fix for another year with the same lo as they are still the cheapest
That’s a shame Rodent! I found that it would only save me about £60 a year going onto the dirt cheap plans compared to the green ones so thought it was worth paying that little bit extra for the warm fuzzy feeling of doing my very small bit for the whole climate change thing. £200 does seem a little steep though.
The government really should be subsidising these plans more than they do to get as many people on them as possible and discouraging the burning of fossil fuels!
There are many ways to save from our energy consumption, and one of the latest proposal is the innovated metering tool. Appropriate meter reading helps reduce the billing rate, as it also reminds the user to be thrifty in this concern.
When it comes to renewable energy, the positives outweigh the negatives. Transitioning to renewables on a personal, corporate, or governmental level will not only help you save money but also promote a cleaner, healthier environment for the future.
Installing solar panels is one of the easiest ways to go green.