Power struggle: How to cut electricity use in your home

With the world in the throes of an energy crisis and people anxiously awaiting their bills this winter, Bridget Ginnity provides some helpful suggestions on how you can reduce your energy consumption and provides you with a guide on just how much each appliance and activity is costing you

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you’ll know that electricity bills have sky rocketed.

The average bill is expected to be almost €2,200 a year, or €180 a month. That’s about €1,000 higher than this time last year if you are on the best rate. It could be another €1000 with some suppliers.

Even with government intervention, we can expect higher prices to stay for the immediate future.

Fretting about the bills or fighting over who left the lights on is a normal response but doesn’t do our mental and physical wellbeing any good.

We can feel more in control if we understand the most effective ways to reduce those bills and take action. And we don’t have to live in the cold and dark to make savings we can notice.

A good start is to look at both what uses a lot of electricity and what we use most often.

In hot water

Younger people don’t get jokes about who left the immersion on but maybe that’s about to change.

Even though we are no longer paranoid about it, heating water is the major use of electricity for most households.

If you don’t have a well-insulated cylinder, don’t bother reading any more. Go out and buy a lagging jacket and save about 30% on your water heating.

For those of us with well-insulated cylinders, many now take the “leave it on” approach. But even well-insulated cylinders lose about 1-2 units of energy a day before you turn on a tap, about €300 a year.

A standard hot water cylinder heated by an immersion heater takes about 5 units of electricity to heat up. If you are working your way through two cylinders per day that’s 300 units per month or €130.

If the cylinder is heated by oil fired central heating, it will use around a half litre of oil to heat up, and again if going through two cylinders of hot water per day, that’s 30 litres of oil per month.

You can save a lot by using a timer with a timed boost facility – and time it to switch off before you use the hot water. It also helps to switch it off completely if you are away for an extended period.

Another potential saving is to reduce the thermostat setting on your cylinder. If your cylinder is old and it takes a long time to heat up, our hard Clare water might have coated the element in limescale.

Cleaning or changing the element saves energy and improves performance.

Showers are a major use of hot water. The basic shower, without luxuriating under the hot flow, uses around one unit of electricity.

Obvious ways to save are to reduce the time, the pressure and the temperature. You could consider sharing a shower, but you may be tempted to spend longer in it.

Daily showers are commonplace but do we really need to shower every day?

In addition to washing off dirt, we wash off bacteria that are better at odour control than the fanciest deodorant and it dries up our skin. Give it a skip and see how it works for you.

The old story that showers were better than baths only applied in the early days of dribbling shower heads. If you are singing for 10 minutes under a power shower, that probably uses more hot water than a bath.

When we turn on a hot water tap, there is a lot of heat lost in the pipes. Consider how often you turn on the hot tap to rinse something but switch it off before the water gets hot. Often the cold tap would do the trick. Maybe putting a cover on the hot tap would help to change the habit.

Heating

If you are using electricity for home heating, the main thing is to insulate well and stop all draughts.

Turning the thermostat down by 1° can reduce heating bills by 10% and timers can optimise the times it is operating.

But be careful if you have a varied routine, as timers can waste energy in that case. Switch the heater off before you plan to leave the room, allowing for the time it takes for your rooms to lose heat.

It’s good to give the house a good airing, particularly when it is well insulated. You want to change the air but not cool down the walls.

The most energy efficient way is to open all the windows and internal doors for no more than 10 minutes, while the heating is off.

Lighting

Do you still have old incandescent light bulbs? You can typically save €6 per year for every bulb by changing to an LED. Because LEDs are about eight times more energy efficient, obsessing about switching lights off can be more effort than it’s worth.

Nevertheless, leaving lights on unnecessarily for hours adds up. Timers can be useful if you want lights on for security. Although we save on efficiency with LED, we can lose that gain with the number of lights we use and leaving them on for a long time.

The trend has been to replace the single bulb in the ceiling with several lights in the room, so maybe you can remove some bulbs and still find your way around. For outdoor lights, is there any reason to leave outdoor lights on when everyone is home for the night?

And again, how many do we need? Switching outdoor lights off is also good for the insects birds and bats who get discombobulated by outdoor lights, and don’t know if it’s day or night.

In the kitchen

If all this talk of energy savings is getting too much, put the kettle on for a nice cuppa. But make sure you don’t overfill it. Changing from a full kettle to just what you need saves a little – enough for about six coffees out!

Small changes can have a big impact in cooking. Halving the water in the pot saves half the energy, and is often good for flavour. And putting veg in a steamer is best for nutritional value and saves a pot. And put a lid on it.

If you tend to put the oven on to preheat and forget about it, set a timer to remind you to pop the pizza in.

Plan your oven usage. Bread plus casserole plus baked potatoes plus baked veg costs the same as baking bread on its own.

Fridges are big energy users. It costs less than 50c when it’s closed all day, but that defeats the purpose.

Every time you open the fridge door for 10-20 seconds, it takes 45 minutes for your fridge to reset to its original temperature.

Overfilling and putting hot food in also takes extra energy, and isn’t good for temperature control. And maybe your fridge is colder than it needs to be? 4-5 ° is still safe.

Similar advice applies to freezers. It can take a while rooting around to find those peas so imposing a bit of order on the freezer can save the time the door is open.

For a gold star, have a list of what is in the freezer and where to find it. And defrosting every six months keeps it running efficiently.

If you have a dishwasher, it is actually more efficient than handwashing, as long as you have it full. It typically costs €0.65 for one cycle. If you wash by hand and that is your main hot water use, it is much cheaper to heat what you need in an electric kettle, rather than leaving the immersion on all day.

Generally, newer appliances are more energy efficient, and that coloured bar chart sticker gives important information.

When you are choosing between appliances, don’t just look at the price but also at the energy consumption to see what it will actually cost you– the sales person can help you.

Dirty laundry

Another big user in most households is clothes washing. There are plenty of opportunities to save here. My favourite is don’t wash clothes as often – and they even last longer then. Detergents can be used at 30° nowadays.

The savings depend on the number of washes but turning the dial down from 40° gives a saving of typically €30 a year – not huge but it is painless.

Tumble dryers are energy guzzlers, potentially costing hundreds of euro a year; three hours of drying costs about €4. Reduce how often you use it and also for how long.

If the clothes create sparks when you take them out, you’ve wasted heat. Overloading is a false economy as it actually uses more energy. Dryer balls are reported to reduce the energy use by 25%.

Don’t forget the clothes lines. If you spend a lot of time in the house, and can dash out to bring the clothes in during rain, this is by far the cheapest option. A covered outdoor drying area is a good idea and will pay back the investment in less than a year.

And do your really need to iron pyjamas? Cutting out one hour ironing saves you a euro. It’s a good excuse.

Entertainment

You‘ll be pleased to hear that modern TVs, laptops and other entertainment devices don’t draw much electricity.

Leaving them charging or on standby isn’t a huge energy use either but if you are really looking to minimise your usage, then switch all appliances off at the socket when not in use.

How SMART are we

Over 1 million households have smart meters and in theory they can do all sorts of things to help us be energy efficient.

They can switch on appliances when prices are low, enable you to operate things remotely and generally save the universe.

In practice, it gives information on our usage pattern to the supplier and not much more.

A recent report showed that only 4% of those installed are actually on the SMART payment plan – and it may be costing them more than their old one.

The SMART meter can’t show what you use yet but you can buy a plug-in Energy Meter for about €20.

This shows the energy guzzlers in your home and what changes will give you most savings.

Check your contract though. If you get carried away and reduce to about 2kWH a day on average, your supplier might slap you with a low usage premium!

Switching supplier has often been touted as a way to save but the options are a lot less now than they had been. You can check out if you can gain at websites like bonkers.ie

The bigger picture

Appliances and households differ, so each household can decide the best way to get electricity savings depending on their situation.

Making changes that are the most effective and the most convenient to do are likely to be easier to sustain in the long run, rather than stopping every little thing.

When we are worrying about how we will pay these extra electricity charges, it is hard to consider the wider picture.

But the pictures from Pakistan and around the world show that climate change is an enormous cost to us all, in every way, and that the poorest pay the highest price.

If we reduce our energy usage by 4 units (kWh) per day – a 25% reduction for the average household – the financial saving is €400 to 700 per year, depending on the supply contract.

The reduction in our carbon footprint is around a half tonne of carbon dioxide.

We can reduce our carbon emissions further by looking out the window before we use high energy appliances. The percentage of renewables on the grid in any given hour varies between 0% and 70% depending on how windy it is.

So if we can choose the times for things like tumble dryers and car chargers, we should do it when the carbon emissions are least.

That won’t save money but it will help to save the planet. Eirgrid has this live information on its website showing the electricity demand in the state and the amount of wind energy – Google smartgriddashboard to find it.

HOW TO GAUGE ELECTRICITY COST

Electric power is measured in Watts, after the British inventor James Watt. 1000 Watts is a kilowatt, often written kW.

Most appliances have a label that says how many Watts they draw (the power rating).

The amount of electricity you use depends on the power rating and the time used, called kilowatt hours (kWh), which is the “unit” of electricity supply and gas energy given on your energy bill.

A 1kW heater running for one hour uses one kilowatt hour, or one unit of electricity.

A 100W light burning for 10hours uses 1kWh. A 2kW iron used for 1 hour uses 2kWh.

At present a kWh costs between 30 c and 50c per unit, depending on supplier. Lower rates are available if you have a night meter, but you need to calculate night time usage carefully to ensure
a saving, as there is an extra standing charge for the night meter.

Below are approximate costs for everyday activities, based on the current lowest standard rate prices – the older the appliance, the less energy efficient it is likely to be:

• Keeping an immersion heater on for 5 hours: €3

• Tumble dryer for 1 hour: €1.30

• Iron for 1 hour: €1

• Dishwasher for 1 cycle: 70c

• Cooking in an oven for about 1hr: 50c

• Washing machine for 1 cycle: 50c

• Using an electric shower for about 15 minutes: 50c

• Watching a (modern) TV for 4 hours: 6c

• Using a laptop  for 4hours: 6c

• Keeping a typical LED light bulb on for 8 hours: 1c