The Waller Gas, Elec, Water Blog

Home energy check
Energy Saving Trust

I filled in the Energy Saving Trust home energy check today. Seemed a bit trivial. If that is all there is then why does it cost so much when you call in the professionals to do it. My house is rated "F" which is not very good. If I did some things it could be rated "D" which is average.

Things I could do are:

• Loft Insulation - currently about 100mm, could be 270mm (about 11 inches). This is not a good suggestion because the attic is full of junk and the ceiling joists are only about 5 inches. And as this is a chalet roofed house the loft is only part of the upper surface anyway. To fill the sloping bits of the roof would be possible but these should remain ventilated.
• Cavity Wall Insulation - yes, this would save fuel. But other experts tell us that the cavity wall space is to keep the house dry, and there have been cases where damp has come in by filling the cavity.
• Improve the thermostats on the central heating - we have radiator thermostats, we could install room thermostats; this we will do sometime, but our plumber says the saving would not be very great. And he also says the new condensing boilers do not show benefits until the system warms up and are a pain to maintain.
• The check indicates an estimated fuel bill of £1486 per year. Doing the above could reduce this to £1058. In fact my dual-fuel bill with Southern Electric will be £1160. Note we have given up Staywarm when they increased their monthly charge, again, to £1260. They all do this; sell you a teaser, then jack it up in the hope you will not notice.

Energy Performance Certificate
After June 2007, when you sell your house you require to have an Energy Efficiency Certificate, Rating A through G, provided by an approved inspector, and part of the Home Information Pack. The Efficiency rating part handles gas and electricity used. The environmental impact rating measures the CO2 impact on the enviroment. For every kilowatt hour used in the home, another three are lost at the power station and in the distribution network.

The sums are a bit of a black art, all keyed into a handheld calculator downloaded to a PC where the program you can buy for £400 will do the sums. But as I understand it, the rating goes like this:

• Flat / Terrace / End-Terrace / Detached House / Bungalow
• Flat roof / Ridged roof / accommodation in roof
• No of rooms (count them all)
• Conservatory / Heating / Double glazed
• Main walls: cavity insulated / cavity / solid
• Main Roof: Pitched 250mm insulation / 100mm insulation / no insulation
• Main Floor: Insulated solid / uninsulated solid / wood
• Windows: Double glazed / single glazed / drafty
• Main Heating: Gas condensing boiler / gas boiler / back boiler / coal
• Heating Controls: Room thermostat plus radiator thermostats / either / none
• No of working chimneys
• Secondary Heating: flame-effect fire or electric / coal
• Hot Water: From central heating / uninsulated pipes and hot tank
• Lighting: Low energy lighting in all outlets / some / none
• Bonus: Solar water heating, Solar electricity, Wind turbine, Ground source heat pumps, Biomass, Small scale hydro; all of which are expensive, but do attract government grants.

Introduction
Sample output document

Saving Energy
Saving water and gas is straight-forward. Turn it down, or turn it off. Electricity is so much imbedded into modern life that saving is more of a challenge. A good rule is to attack the biggest problem areas first. Here is a list of things with the number of minutes per unit of electricity. A unit costs about 10p. Make savings working down from the top.

15 minutes (1 load = 60 minutes) Dish washer, clothes washer, or tumble dryer
20 minutes Immersion heater, instant water heater, or heater-shower
20 minutes Air Conditioning
20 minutes Bar Fire (3kw)
20 minutes (1 boil = 3 minutes) Kettle (2.5kw)
20 minutes Conventional oven
30 minutes Fan-assisted oven
30 minutes Fan Heater (2kw)
50 minutes Underfloor Heating (1.7kw) say 12 hours/day
60 minutes Hair-dryer
60 minutes Iron
90 minutes Microwave (typical running time 3 to 8 minutes)
6 hours Fridge/Freezer (170w) but only when cooling
8 Hours Computer (130w)
11 hours Gas central heating pump (90w)
20 hours TV + Cable/Digital box (50w)(10w on standby)
16 hours for each 60w conventional lightbulb
50 hours for each energy saving lightbulb
24 hours Fan
1 week Mobile phone charger

My house:
11 hours clocks and things base load (90w)
12 hours Lounge 4x energy saving bulbs (80w)
7 hours Kitchen 7x halogen spots (150w)

A tip if you have energy saving lightbulbs, switch them on only once a day as it is the number of initial switch-ons that governs the life of the bulb; so they are not good for bedside lights or in the loo.

Apparently most modern buildings use between 80 and 250kw/year per square metre, while older building can use up to 300kw/sqm. My house uses 31763kw/year (UK average 39600) and we have 100sq/sqm and that is 317kw/sqm which is not very good. Or are these standards for office buildings? And perhaps only for heating; in which case my house would be 257kw/sqm.

Petrol
I am now spending more on petrol (£1456 per year) than on all the other energy uses. I wonder whether we should concentrate on saving car journeys. Get my wife out on a bicycle.

See also Bills for Utilities
See also Energy Performance Certificate

I just found a tumble drier with 'A' rating (same as a low energy lightbulb. You leave it on overnight and it doens't use heat, just air, to dry a load. Clever, huh? Most of the rest are 'C' or worse.
Lois

Bills for Utilities
It seems to me that bills for gas, electricity, and water are purposely opaque to prevent you checking them with the meter, and certainly to prevent price comparison with alternative sources of supply. Comparisons could be on yearly figures, bills are quarterly, direct debits are monthly. Don't get confused. Winter usage tends to be three times summer usage. After a lot of thought and phone calls here are some notes.

Gas Measured in units which is a volume figure. You multiply by 31.3 to get to kilowatt/hours (kwh). On our bill the first bit is at a high rate (2.88) and the rest at a lower rate (2.13). Salesmen make much of these figures, but this is useless unless you know the threshold. Our bill would be £658/year.

Electricity The meter reads kwh which is fine. Our high rate is 11.51 and the lower 7.22. Again thresholds vary. Our bill would be £797/Year

www.uswitch.com seems to be pretty accurate.

Water
Option 1 is on rateable value (338) with prices for supply, waste water, surface water, and highways. This year it would be £500
Option 2 is to have a meter. This is designed to to bill you in cubic metres which equals one thousand litres. For domestic use you can read in litres but the units figure is a separate dial to confuse you. They assume that 92.5% of the supply water is discharged as waste. On top there is a standing charge.
We get a rebate because the surface water goes into our own soakaway. We use an average of 3610 litres/week which is 258 litres/per person/per day. The national average is apparently 160 lpd - we must have more showers than the average. Put another way, the average family of four uses water weighing about two-thirds of a tonne each day.
Our metered water bill is £480/Year, or £1.32/day.

Salesmen seem not to be very good at predicting what your annual consumption will be. We signed up for Powergen Staywarm Dual-Fuel www.staywarm.co.uk/ which is a fixed cost deal for older folk and for us was £400/Year cheaper. But over the year the monthly charge slowly excalated until it was double the orignal, and £20 more than other suppliers. A neighbour signed up with another supplier who billed him monthly a fairly low rate, and then after a year or so sent him a massive bill reflecting the accurate readings rather than the salesman's guess.

We have now signed up with Southern Electricity dual-fuel which has a good rate also for telephone with all local calls free. At a time when all the bills are increasing I shall have to keep a sharp eye on the Internet energy pages.

Saving Water

Saving water in the house

Cleaning teeth; remember to turn off the tap while brushing your teeth. A running tap wastes over 6 litres per minute.

Flushing the Loo; about a third of water use in a home apparently is in flushing the loo; about 12 litres a pull. www.interflush.co.uk have a £20 device which allows you to stop flushing when the bowl is adequately clear. Or the water board will give you a free 'hippo bag' to go in the cistern. Or just bend the rod attached to the float so it stops further down the cistern, Or you could follow the oft-stated maxim "If it is yellow, let it mellow. If it is brown, flush it down".

Stop those drips; a dripping tap wastes at least 5,500 litres of water a year; a new tap washer could save you over £18 a year.

Fill up those dishwashers; dish-washers typically uses about 15 to 27 litres per session; but don't rinse dishes under a running tap - just scrape them.

Fill those clothes washers; they use about 55 litres per load.

Avoid a bath; a bath can use over 100 litres; a shower only uses a third of that amount. Avoid power-showers.

Frigid water; fill a jug with tap water and leave it to cool in your fridge. This way you don't have to run the tap for ages just to get a cold drink.

Burst pipe preparedness: Check out where your main stop valve is and make sure that you can turn it on and off. If ever a pipe bursts, you'll know how to cut off the flow.

Wash the car with bucket and sponge;

For the garden

Fit a water butt in the garden Catch all the rain you can in a water butt. Plants love rain water. Also good for the fish pond, dog's bowl and the bird bath.

Grey water is valuable, but only for the plants. And it goes sour if you keep it too long. My neighbour has plumbed his upstairs shower and bath into a rainwater butt which works fine. Just avoid detergent and harsh chemicals.

Put a large bucket outside the backdoor, and when you run water till it comes hot, or drain the kettle before refilling it, or wash vegetables, or empty the old water out of the dog's bowl, or wet the floor cloth, or just rinse your hands, then keep the water in a bowl and empty the bowl into your bucket just outside. Small problem: in the watering-can, the potato peelings may block the sprinkler rose, but with care you can overcome this.

Water your garden with a watering can; garden sprinklers uses over 1,000 litres of water per hour, more than a family of four in 1 day.

Soak the roots of garden plants rather than sprinkling the leaves.

Water in the early morning or late evening; watering during the day will mostly be lost by evaporation.

Cover the ground; apply mulch to cover the ground around plants, it will lock in moisture and help prevent weeds. Use pebbles, gravel, cocoa shell, chipped bark, grass clippings, or mature compost.

Keep grass long; don't cut the lawn too short.

Set priorities for watering; plants in containers need to be watered more often than those planted in the ground.

Drought tolerant plants; some plants really like dry conditions and if you've got a sandy or free draining soil, these plants will love it. Small leaves and hairy, waxy, leathery or succulent leaves are all signs that a plant could be drought tolerant.

Perhaps give up hanging baskets, bedding plants, tomatoes, and anything that needs watering.

Also try www.water.org.uk
www.waterwise.org.uk/
www.beatthedrought.com/
www.southernwater.co.uk/beatthedrought/

Weekly Use

Here is what I do with the three tons of water I get for £7.20 per week

The manual says the water softener should be only 50 per session.
And now it has started to rain again and the water butts are full to overflowing, the garden should be less.

24 August 2006

Water Saving Comment
(from a reader) Very interesting blog. Found it when looking for info on electricity cost and savings. Intrigued by your water usage at 258 litre per day. We've just had a meter installed 3 months ago and I reckon we've probably saved about 50% on our annual bill which was much the same as yours at £450pa. We are currently looking at about 80 litres pp pd usage, approx 10 m3 per month. This is with 2 young children so I don't know how it is so low other than we don't always flush loo and have water butts for garden.
Andy

17 September 2006

Washing the car
(from a reader)

www.miracledrywash.com is a liquid that you spray on the car and gently wipe in and allow to dry, then dust off with a second clean cloth. Apparently the dust is trapped in the liquid and will not scratch the car. You would save about 170 litres of water against using the hose.

Me? I use a watering can, and only use about 30 litres, and in this way can I get the mud off, and clean the black muck off the wheels.   10 October 2006

Hippo Bags

I left a message with Southern Water asking them for a 'hippo' bag to put into the toilet cistern. It arrived after a month - perhaps they were out of stock. They save one litre per flush, and my house has 20 flushes a day. Interestingly my plumber is against the idea. The cistern is designed to do the correct job. Anyway it would be easier to bend the ball-valve rod. Anyway, the hippo is now immersed and we shall see.

Grey Water

I have a whole water-butt full of grey water saved during the drought. I use it for washing the car; and for watering plants in the greenhouse. Can't think of anything else. Rain water goes into a separate water-butt and is useful for the birdbath and the dog's bowl..   1 January 2008

Global water use

The amount of water used outside the home is a much greater problem.

• one litre of petrol uses 2.5 litres in production
• one litre of biofuel uses 1000 litres to grow
• one T-shirt uses 2700 litres to grow and produce
• one kilo of wheat needs 4000 litres to grow
• one kilo of beef needs 16,000 litres to grow the food and the cow

The World Economic Forum meeting in Davos says the proper figure could be as high as 13 million litres per year/person. And by 2020, between 75m and 250m people will be exposed to increased levels of water stress. By 2050 there will be 9 billion people on earth.

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