Saving Energy in the Home: Four Firm Favourites

With the energy prices about to soar again as the price cap is removed from electricity, is there anything we can do to cut the costs other than trying to get a better deal? We asked local environmentalist and electrical engineer Bernie Charlesworth for practical tips on how to save costs.

Heating Your Home

Heating is always the big one. The difficulty with radiators and fires is that the heat rises and doesn’t heat us directly.

The planet is heated by infrared radiation from the sun through a vacuum, so this is quite efficient. Swapping to an infrared panel, which can cost as little as £100, can heat the people in the room instead of the air in the room, saving you quite a lot of money as you are only heating one room and not the entire house.

Cooking

Preparing hot food is another way to save money. It used to be said it's good to be cooking on gas, but a gas hob heats a pan indirectly while an induction hob heats the pan directly, so it makes sense to save money and move to induction. Also, a gas hob has no chimney, so the products of burning the gas go out into the room. These include carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, and sulphur dioxide - all three gases are toxic and harm our lungs.

The price of an air fryer is cheap, and they are also very efficient. A quick-cooking air fryer can be used to cook food instead of using a big expensive gas oven.

Shower or Bath?

This is an easy one. If you collect the water from a shower, it's a much smaller amount used compared to that of a bath.

The most efficient way of heating the water is from a heat pump, which can give you three times the heat from a single unit of energy - supplied overnight with cheap electricity. The second most efficient is a gas boiler where for every 1 kW burnt, 0.9 kW is turned into heat. Lastly, and to be avoided, is the electric shower, which takes massive amounts of electricity to run for just a few minutes.

Transport

Transport is always a big cost. If you have a drive and can fit a charger, an electric car is very efficient with 98% of the energy from the motor going to the wheels instead of 20-35% efficiency from an internal combustion engine.

Join us next month for part two of how to generate your own electricity.

Saving Energy in the Home: Four Firm Favourites