When it comes to making energy savings around the home, there are certain hints, tips and tricks that everyone should really be aware of by now. Things like keeping the windows closed on cold days, closing internal doors and generally bundling up on cold days are pretty common knowledge these days. But at the same time, there’s a second and equally extensive list of trade secrets which for some reason rarely get as much publicity as their counterparts.
The thing is, every single change made to your home’s energy use habits will result in a market improvement to your annual spending on bills. As such, there’s really no such thing as making too much effort for the cause as every last thing you do and every investment you make will be repaid several times over.
So, along with the rather obvious approaches to minimising home energy use, here’s a look at a few examples of the less well-known but equally effective tricks to add into the mix:
1 – Smart Heating Controls
One of the very best and easiest ways of ensuring real and constant savings these days is to invest in smart heating controls for the home. They cost next to nothing to get hold of, can be installed in no time and guarantee exceptional savings month after month. Some ensure the heating is turned off as you leave the home, others allow you to remotely control your heating from anywhere in the world and most can be programmed to make the most of off-peak energy savings. In all cases, it’s an investment that pays off.
2 – Halogen Ovens
According to the UK’s leading energy providers, a simple halogen has the potential to save the average household over £100 on their electricity bills every year. They use less than 25% of the energy of a standard oven, they cook up to twice as fast and yet they cost as little as £25 to buy in the first place. For smaller meals in particular, they can be absolute godsends.
3 – Chimney Blocks
If you have an open fire or any other kind of installation that uses your home’s chimney stack, it’s a necessary evil. If by contrast you don’t use it at all and have no plans to start doing so in the near future, why not plug it up and prevent all that lovely heat from escaping? This isn’t something you want to be going about manually as it needs to be a block that’s both effective and easy to remove when the time comes, but seek the right help and it takes a matter of minutes and can be done for next to nothing. And once sorted, you could save well over £200 per year.
4 – Voltage Optimisers
There’s often a huge difference between the amount of energy your appliances need and the energy that’s fed into your home as standard. In fact, estimates suggest that the vast majority of electrical devices around most homes are using up about 10% more energy than they actually need to be. This is where voltage optimisers come into the equation, which are cheap to buy, simple to have installed and yet can bring about a 10% saving in energy bills across the board every month of the year.
5 – (Comprehensive) Draught Proofing
The key word here being ‘comprehensive’ as while you might pop the odd draught excluder by a door or two here and there, there’s much more to draught proofing than this. If you’d like to make the most of savings up to £100 or so, you’ll need to be looking at getting rid of any minor gaps around windows, doors, letterboxes, loft hatches and so on. It sounds like a pain in the neck, but you’ll only need to do it once for savings that are well worth the effort.
6 – Energy Efficient Lighting
Last but not least, one of the greatest advances in recent history by way of energy efficient lighting has been the advent of LED technology. Best of all, it’s now perfectly possible to pick up LED bulbs for the home for prices about 85% lower than they were just two years ago. For each LED bulb you install in place of a standard light bulb, you’ll save an average of £3 per year. This might not sound like a lot, but when you think about the number of bulbs around the home plus the fact that LED bulbs can last in excess of 20 years, you start to realise the value each of these bulbs can truly have.