Gas consumption

It has, as you may have noticed, been unusually cold, on and off, this winter.  This has meant that we have had the heating turned up higher than normal, plus we've had it on for longer than we might ordinarily do.  I have been pondering the gas bills in a nervous sort of a way.

I was listening to the radio the other week and an "Efficient Energy Usage" bod was on chatting about how to minimise the damage the cold weather was having on people's energy budgets.  He suggested that heating should be left on all the time, but the boiler turned down to low and the radiators individually turned up to high, or the thermostat turned to around 17 or 18d. He argued, convincingly, that turning the heating off overnight and during the day meant that houses got very cold and damp, twice a day, and that restoring things to a normal temperature took lots more energy than just keeping things ticking over in the first place.

Made sense to me, so I decided to give it a go.  And found that turning the radiators up to high bumped the temperature up to about 23d or so which is too hot for me.  I like to have the room temperatures lower than that and to wear a jumper so as to minimise the shock when venturing outside.

I turned the radiators down.  And found that it is actually quite easy, by playing with the radiator taps, to keep the house at a fairly consistent 17d.  The boiler didn't seem to be working as hard.  All seemed good - except that when i have a bit of spare money kicking about (so in about 2055, then!) I might arrange to have a wall thermostat installed rather than messing about with the individual radiator valves.

Then I  got the monthly gas bill (yes - I do get monthly rather than quarterly energy bills; makes it easier to monitor things) and was seriously appalled.  HOW MUCH?!?!?!?!?!?!?  This experiment was clearly a major failure.  I looked back to see how much the equivalent month was last year.  And found that, huge though January's bill might have been, it was actually half what it was last year.  Last year's bill had obviously come as such a shock that I had blotted it from my memory :-S

I have decided to carry on with the experiment for the time being and see what happens.

In the meantime, after waiting for over two weeks for a plumber to come and sort out our hot water tap in the kitchen, a boy finally turned up. It seems that British Gas (who supply our plumbing and boiler insurance) had been battling with an extraordinarily high demand for fixing burst water mains, burst pipes, dead boilers and other such catastrophes and our faulty tap didn't count as urgent. He hasn't fitted the new tap but managed to put a new washer in the old one.  So we need to sort out a plumber to put the pretty new tap on when we get back.  And also to have the stop cock replaced so we can actually use it.  I admit that a stop cock sat behind the fridge isn't entirely convenient, but it is even less convenient when you can't turn it!  The running hot water tap, I hasten to add, hadn't added to household expenditure.  Out hot water is an "on demand" system and we had turned it off unless we actually needed hot water.  And we don't have a water meter but pay a set fee per year so it doesn't actually matter at all how much water we waste.  This horrifies the Australian in me but did make life more relaxed when we couldn't turn the tap off. We try not to let it make us profligate with water use most of the time.