# A Penny Saved
An old english proverb:
> A penny saved is a penny earned.
The average household spends a significant amount of money each year
on heating and lighting. Making small changes that affect energy
consumption over the course of a year can lead to substantial savings.
In order to see the effects of these changes I collated all our usage
data as far back as I could and made some charts of our yearly usage:
Seeing as electricity is the most expensive of the utilities I started
there. You can see from the above charts that I made a focused effort
to reduce consumption since 2019. I practically halved our electricity
usage in a year.
Let me help you save some money with some easily achievable changes.
## LED bulbs
An easy retrofit solution, most common bulb types are available off
the shelf and available cheaply.
As a brief savings example, we have two light fittings in our kitchen.
Each had 4x G10 50w halogen bulbs. That's 400w burning every time we
switched them on. If we ran them just 2 hours a day, at the UK average
for electricity (17.9p/kWH), that would be 52.27 per anum for one room.
When we changed those bulbs to an equivalent LED, at 4.5w per bulb the
yearly cost drops to 4.70. A yearly saving of 47.57!
## 24/7 electric devices
This is a broad category but bear with me as there are big savings to
be had with anything that's running 24/7.
The key to this is having a plug in meter to measure how much power a
device is consuming.
I had a web-server running from home which I calculated was costing
98.57 per anum. I looked into a small VPS, which was more than
adequate for my needs. The cost of which is 54.80, a saving of 43.77.
I found some devices that were using quite a bit of electric while on
standby. This promtped me to either unplug them when not in use or
get rid of them altogether.
Some suggestions:
- Fridge / Freezer
- TV
- TV boxes / DVD players
- Chargers for phones / laptops
- Computers & monitors
- Game consoles
As a result of this testing I unplugged a number of devices which
consumed up to 5w while on standby and replaced a monitor which was
drawing 27w with an equivalent that only drew 13w. I also stopped
using a second computer and connected a monitor to use the same file
server that was already running 24/7.
## Whistling kettle (gas stove)
An odd move you may think as it's probably more efficient to heat water
using an electric kettle. The problem, we found, was that we frequently
left it boiling and forgot, causing us to re-boil. With a whistling
kettle it screamed until we dealt with it and made the tea.
It may not be as energy efficient, but gas is cheaper per unit and
the kettle only ever gets boiled once to make tea.
## Insulation
If you can save the heat escaping from your home then you don't need
to burn the fuel to heat it. The recommended loft insulation depth
here in the UK is now at 300mm. Most houses built in the last 50 years
are insulated but probably only with 100mm.
When we moved into our current home there was 100mm. I have recently
purchased another 200mm layer to put atop and I'm waiting to see how
much gas we save this winter.
## Heating
Another tip for saving energy is to only heat the areas of your home
that you are using and when you're using them. Most homes are fitted
with a single thermostat, usually in a hallway, which is inefficient.
Our routine and rooms that we use are fairly consistent. We mainly
use the small living room, kitchen and two bedrooms. The other rooms
we have turned off the radiators to save heat being disipated there.
The high tech, and quite expensive, solution to this heating problem
are zoned heating systems, with electronic TRV valves, which can
activate the boiler on an individual room/zone basis.
