Manual dishwashing

Recently we have been looking at the cost of running the dishwasher. Whilst it is a fairly "green" appliance in itself, we found we were often running it half-empty and then sitting watching the digits clocking up on our electricity monitor. So with a bit of a change to our way of working in the kitchen, we try and wash up our own small amounts of dirty crockery in the sink (a plate and a teacup from lunch from example). Getting the kids to do that too is another challenge, but we'll get there. Then we only run the dishwasher when we have had a large meal or when there has been some heavy-duty cooking going on with enough dirty pots and pans to fill out the dishwasher.

Bulb hoarders

Apparently people are going to great lengths to hang on to their incandescent light bulbs. However in our house we have been moving away from these for some time and recently took a long hard look at our lounge lighting. In keeping with the style of our cottage, the previous owner had installed two 5-light pendants with flowery shades and a standard 60 watt bulb in each socket. We figured 600W was more than was required to light the room, so we changed to more eco-friendly 40W candle-style bulbs, a dimmer switch, and did away with the shades. This should also bring our electricity costs down a little bit more, especially in the winter.

Results of the first quarter

As luck would have it, the latest bill has arrived today from Npower Juice.

Previous quarter Dec, Jan and Feb (pre-monitoring) - £293.
Last quarter (using eco-monitor) - £197.

Some of the winter quarter cost will be because - well, it was winter. But we heat by gas so it would really only be extra hours of lighting. So it seems that the outlay of £50 for the monitor has more than repaid itself in the first quarter!

Energy saving starts at home

This is the first entry in an occasional blog about how we are going about saving energy in our daily lives. We are a two-parent two-child family spending money on all the usual things families spend their money on. Seemingly more and more of this spending has been on energy lately. We had a big wake up call in March 2008, the first electricity bill after the January price hikes arrived and it was almost £300 for the quarter. And we don't do a lot of car mileage compared to some so we also really noticed the petrol price increases as the cost of filling the tank jumped in what seemed to be £5 increments every time. Food bills have also been going up and we have also been taking steps to bring that spending under control as well.

The basic idea here is not to spend loads of cash to install expensive solar water heating and so on, but make and record little changes here and there which we have found or think will be beneficial.

The first thing we did was to buy an Eco Eye Electricity Monitor. This is a gadget that clips to your electricity meter and sends wireless information to a display unit about the amount of electricity being consumed. The display unit sits on the mantelpiece and we have become adept at monitoring the numbers it displays. Evenings we are aiming at a steady 10-12p an hour and in the daytime it's down to about 6p. If the digits start to look horribly larger than that we can automatically think about what might be causing it. Sometimes it's simply someone boiling a kettle or making toast, but other times it will be a kitchen or bedroom light left on unattended.

By being consciously aware of the cost of electricity consumption we can now take more control over our spending in this area and we are on course to make some good savings.