Energy prices, what's your plan?

It's also a nice theory as to why ghosts are so often associated with that era. CO at lower concentrations can cause hallucinations, delusions and forgetfulness (i.e. why is that object here when it wasn't before). There is a famous reddit thread of someone thinking a intruder was leaving them notes etc but turned out to be themselves and they were suffering CO poisoning which reddit pointed out to them.

 

Bit late the the party with this thread and posting but my plan is pretty much in full swing now and is nearing its completion.

im abusing the hell out of my current rate of 12.93p a unit in the day and 5p at night until end of April however I’ve monitored my spend in units and saved the difference.
From doing that against what was predicted for October prior to the £2500 lock, I managed to add enough to the pot so that I could put in a 18panel array with sell back and 10.4kwh of battery storage with another 9.5kwh of storage on the way.

Solar will charge the batteries easily from march until October, I’ll then use the cheap rate at night to charge them in the winter months, topping up with the limited solar in the day.

The savings against the unit costs I may by charging at night, the money to grid and the difference on standard rate is going in another pot and an air source heat pump will be going in probably next summer.

Showers will be pulling from heat generated by electricity (which in cases will be free or cheap) and heating the home will do the same.

I’ve added some more insulation in to the loft, everything is on smart home timing gear, every bulb is LED and the tumble dryer will be ran instead of heating downstairs when it can be as it does a good enough job of keeping the home temp topped up downstairs.

A new back door and a replacement window is also going in to kill the heat escaping there. The rear south facing windows have two blinds, white backed to reflect the heat back out in the summer and dark grey backed to help absorb in the cooler months. They don’t get pulled down completely as the drawback is that they are almost blackout like in the darker backing which doesn’t help with the suns light getting in.

The blinds went in last winter and did a great job of holding bedroom temps between 17 and 19c with very little need for the heating to be on beyond around 90 mins a day even on the coldest days.


I currently spend including standing charge less than £40 a month on electricity and about £30 on gas for a 4 bed, family of 5.

I even charge a car on this set up to the sum of around 260 units a month.

The complete cost of amendments to the home (solar, air source etc) is around £20-22k but when you smash through 9600 units of electricity a year and 7000 units of gas, it will soon pay for its self.

My average electricity cost per unit sits at around 6.5pence and even with the new tariff, I won’t be paying more than an average of about 10p so the investment has been well worth it.

All that’s left now is to fine tune how I use the home (when to use tumble dryer, washer, dishwasher etc) and a good couple of months of data should allow me to best get a rotor together so I can make best use of what I have rather than selling back to the grid at naff all.

 

Ooft, about six years at current rates? I was expecting it to be more like 15-20.

I looked into it not long ago but the problem is I absolutely cannot front £20k right now.

 

Short of fixing the remaining falling apart single-glazed windows - which is obviously high on the priority list, but as we have to replace with wooden sash (we're in a conservation area) it aint cheap, (and we're saving up for) there's not much I can do, other than try and minimise usage.

We cant put in solar panels as no roof space - the front south facing aspect of the roof has a peaked dormer in it with skylights either side.
We might be able to put in a air/ground-source heat pump? but space (and cost) is again an issue there.

So tbh, we're just gonna have to grin and bear it; saving what we can in other aspects to somewhat offset the increases.

Luckily we're off to NZ over Christmas so we wont need to heat the house fully for ~5weeks which will help things down, but that was luck rather than judgement.

 

Now we have the new lock in and I can see the new rates per unit etc, it’ll be (assuming my month use and the generation average on the solar doesn’t change from sun hours of recent years) I shall be paid off in 44 months on the solar side given the cheaper 00:30 - 04:30 rates and the battery storage either from that or the solar. As for air source, that’ll increase electric use BUT that should be mitigated by a then requirement of ZERO gas and the fact I can use more of the generated solar in the day that may find its way to the grid at a vastly reduced rate. My guess is that will probably take around 6 years to effectively pay off.

The money was originally going on to the mortgage but I got Locke don at a smidge over 2% (2.04% I think, perhaps a smidge higher) for 10 years and all being well the mess will have blown over by then..

The nasty carpets downstairs are getting ripped up in the next week or two, assuming the carpet has rubbish underlay (I know it’s bad, I just don’t know how bad), replacing it all with some thermally insulated floor panels and then dropping some foam underlay on top of that when the hard floor goes in may also help with keeping heat in the home in the winter and the heat out in the summer.

I just hope I don’t find any nasty surprises as and when the works are done as the piggy bank isn’t endless.

 

A similar situ to my parents. Due to roof design they would need multiple individual panels each with mini inventors and it would just get too expensive too quickly.

Same goes for the windows. I remember flicking ice off of the insides of those in the winter, what a time that was to be alive!

I dread to think what their utility bills are.. mortgage free but they won’t feel that way I can be pretty sure of that.

Enjoy New Zealand! North or South Island?

 

Honestly not sure we'd even have space for any panels!

Need to look at ways to make the windows "better" in the interim; but thats a task that requires time/effort that i dont have what with work being crazy and having two chidlers running around :/

We're off to the North Island, staying within ~3hrs drive of Auckland as SWMBO has family out there (who we'll be visiting); and driving long distance with small chidlers aint fun for anyone.

 

My house is oddly shaped and don't have any ideal space for south facing panels. I still paid to get 10 installed, 5 west and 5 east back in 2015. Turns out I'll get my money back sometime next year, or the year or two after accounting for inflation. Under originally promised 11 year.

It's not always about financial savings. I just want to support this kind of transition.

If solar isn't something you can feasibly install, possibly consider part crowdfund wind turbine?
https://rippleenergy.com/

 

I looked into this sort of thing (I don't think it was the same one though) since solar ins't something that will even remotely "work" in my case

Honestly my spidey senses were tingling as it came across as a a veiled "investment scheme" except without the benefit of any FCA oversight. I'm not implying something shady is going on necessarily, but seemed there would be ample opportunity for skimming in all manner of ways by those pulling the strings. And I had doubts over the true green-ness of all if it since it seemed to have a sort of carbon-credit-like whiff to it.

 

Probably the same one as I am only aware of this one.

As long as they are paying out to your energy provider the same amount as what you've signed up, I don't see any problem. Of course, before putting down any money, need to look closer at what sort of safe guards are in place should the company goes under before your 25 years payback term finishes.

In terms of "green-ness", it's not much different to solar panels. You pay for the install, you get the generation taken off your bills. It's less direct, sure, but end of the day you are directly contributing towards installation of a renewable resource.

I personally think it's more stable, direct and less convoluted way to support renewables compared to buying renewable stock and shares or voting the green party.

I'd be interested to hear any other way to speed up the electrical grid transition away from fossil fuel?

 

I think the key difference was that with solar you can directly use your own power and as such are using less from the grid - as opposed to using the same but having credits based on what "your share" produces - there's a layer of abstraction there that reminds me of early carbon credit sales and the gaming of the system that happened there (i.e. you're preventing an acre of this forest from being flattened... meanwhile that forest is protected by all manner of conservation orders and was never going to be flattened to start with).

I'm not saying it isn't above board, I'm saying that there wasn't enough transparency to reassure me that what they say they're doing, they're definitely doing properly and will continue to do for half a lifetime.

Well I'm certainly not in any way qualified to have the answers, that's for sure.

As with anything that's newish, and involving money, and has noble motives especially, I simply approach it with skepticism, just because people are frequently disgusting things in how they conduct themselves when charged with running such schemes (or any).

 

Pretty sure this was on a feature on Radio 4 a long time ago (well, before the Ukraine war and all the price rises). It may have been on Costing The Earth or similar about 'how do we know that our energy comes from 100% renewables', an energy expert was suggesting this scheme and specifically named Ripple as a good way of going greener. So I think that this one at least is above board and I'm considering this myself.

 

It wouldn't make much sense to install solar panels before a roof replacement.

The approach could somewhat depend on the number of solar panels you're planning to install. Still, they would have to come down either way.

 

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We have that issue. Roof is original and so around 120 years old red tile. We want to keep the sytle of the original roofing so are considering solar tiles.

They are pricey though and less efficient.

 

You lose a fair chunk of efficiency with solar tiles, one option with a new roof is to inset solar panels so that you're not paying for tiles that are then covered by the panels.

 

Well well well...

I've been snooping around with a power meter, handy things.
I've just discovered that a power regenerator I was using (i.e. a VFI UPS without the battery) consumes 250w at idle. Each. There were two plugged in

I no longer need either of them since swapping out some kit and was just using because I had them. I am no longer using them.