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Oil
Use Down 32%
4.9 Tons Of CO2 Saved
Tip
Of The Day:
Close the curtains at night in all rooms
As the cost of heating a home continues to rise it becomes more and more economic
to invest money so save on heating costs. In some cases grants
are available from local councils for various forms of insulation.
While the results here were obtained with oil fired central
heating systems most of the ideas and tips will be applicable to other forms
of heating. After several years of reductions in oil use
we reached the point where the scope for saving without
major investment became more and more limited all the time in our original house. Since moving in November 2009 we have started doing all the easy thing we learnt from last time round and expect it to get much harder to save oil reasonably quickly.
Up until 2005 heating was the area where least work had been
done to save energy with only ad-hoc changes being made until the
middle of 2006 although this did include a lot of the simple
tips. These
changes have made quite a difference despite the addition
of two rooms to the heating system with a new radiator in each.
During 2006 and 2007 some more structured changes were made to the
system which led to even bigger savings. This has included
a major upgrade to the loft insulation and pipe insulation in the
loft which is where most of the wasted heat was to be going. In November 2009 we moved to a new house on the Welsh border so the whole project has started all over again with new challenges and opportunities for saving heat and money.
Unfortunately although oil use has dropped the cost has still
risen due to oil prices more than doubling over the period. One area of heating
costs that we never fully quantified was our use of a wood burning
stove in the lounge on an occasional basis. During 2008 and 2009 we
used this much more. The savings quoted at the top of this page all refer to our original house and are relative to our 2003 bills.
While following the simple tips will
save money, to achieve the biggest saving a structured approach
works best. To get an idea of what can be done in each room of the house take a look at room by room for colour coded tips. It is difficult to compare savings year on year since
the outside temperature is not constant. This means small savings
can be swamped by annual temperature variations, it is still worth
persevering with these since the effect of many small savings is
cumulative and will become noticeable over time as can be seen
from the cost and use information.
Before embarking on expensive measures to reduce costs make sure all the simple and easy to implement changes have been done, the savings obtained may make the expensive changes uneconomic since the pay back time of big changes may be longer than the expected life of the equipment.
These pages are split into two main sections:
General Information and the process used to identify and implement
savings plus a summary of the results which are updated as information
becomes available.
To ease the workload of managing use and costs JSutils has produced two calculators to aid energy use monitoring, an oil use and cost calculator and a gas use and cost calculator.
Caution: Before reducing or
eliminating draughts make sure boilers are adequately ventilated
and properly serviced. If in doubt consult a competent person.
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