Energy prices, what's your plan?

if the likes of ASPM actually worked properly you could probably get the idle consumption of the gaming rig down... but iirc both gpu and mobo makers cheap out to the point where the feature is present but barely working bc they don;t expect anyone to turn it on...

 

Electricity in my house is gone up to over £6 a day that's over double it was before the bull rap, they not making enough profit

 

We're running at £5-6 a day using mostly electricity and gas only for the shower and cooking on the hob.
Mrs A has bought a couple of energy saving items, which we hope will work.
Like @ElThomsono, we're running in & out with washing to catch the dry moments and now have an electrically heated 2 level clothes drying rack, which seems to work well overnight.
In an ideal world the thicker items like sweatshirts & jeans need turning over to get 'cooked' on the other side.

The other item we bought on the recommendation of a good friend, is Ninja's smallest air fryer. A number of people recommended them and said not to buy any other brand. They were out of stock for a while, but we got one after a it of a wait.
It has done really good work so far and we have not had any culinary failures yet. Radio 4's 'Sliced Bread' show investigated air fryers and said that they do use less electricity than a big oven, but are not good if you have to do 3 or more sessions to get what you need cooked.
They do most things pretty well, and we've been able to use the 2 layer cooking option by having one lot of things on the base and something else on the raised insert that is for items that need to be drained of fat or more crispy.
TBH, this is working well for us as we are effectively a family of 2 having packed our youngest off to university last month.
Definitely not a panacea, but we can cook all sorts for 2 at lower temperatures and regularly twice as quickly as the big electric oven.
Last weekend I 'cooked' 2 frozen Pastel de Nata custard tarts in 7 mins, tey need 20 mins in the oven
There is still some friction about how long to do jacket/baked potatoes in the microwave first as I detest 'gritty' potatoes...

I agree with @Byron C that the 'switch it all off' is probably counter productive and saves little electricity in reality.
I think our biggest problem is the under counter fridge & freezer in the kitchen are ancient and way less efficient than current models.
Typically, we wake up to £1.50 or so 'on the clock' while we've been asleep using nothing.

The smart meter has helped, and we do watch it and are trying to be more thoughtful in how we consume energy.
Ours has been set up that £5 a day is what it things is enough, so through the evening if we pass the meter, we'll say at £4.20 say, "80p until bedtime"

If I had the money, I would by a solar and battery setup. I'm sure that Mrs A's garden office could be run off solar, and anything to flatten the 4-7pm peak would be welcome

 

We had a log burner installed last year and have had a fire almost every night in October, which means we're yet to turn the heating on at all...seems like it was a lucky investment

Unfortunately our smart meter won't be installed until mid November, so no idea what I'm spending anyway.

 

Thank jiggery for global warming.
Aside from having to dry some washing the heating has been pretty much turned off, and nixxing 2 fridges and 1 x 300 watt garage heater appears to have done wonders for my leccy use.
Seeing as I work from home 4 days a week I'm happy with that.

 

Lol aye, I'm amazed that it's 16° outside at 7am at the back of October. Overall that's bad news but for now I'm just glad to be warm with the heating off

Also top marks for that reduction, I've been able to do next to nothing for mine, and in fact the small gain we'd made by not using the tumble drier over summer has been lost as it had gotten to the point that things weren't drying even after a couple of days.

 

I've been tracking our usage with the Loop app, it's ok, nothing special. It would be nice if you could log in through a browser or export data. You can see on our electricity use that we had the tumble drier on on the 26th

It does gas as well but that's less interesting right now, it just scrapes it all from some smart meter service so when you connect it it goes back and gathers about a year of historic data, perhaps more if you've had a smart meter longer?

 

Yup, my british gas one goes back 3 years, my electricity usage is down ~25% and my gas a lot more ~70% due to how mild it has been, still had no need for heating, it's only been on to test before winter.

Haven't done a great deal for that reduction, just think that's the impact of a couple of days a week back in the office after Covids full WFH.

 

I've been invited (or rather they've Emailed me and informed me of this, saying by receiving this Email, I'm eligible) Octopus saving session.
https://octopus.energy/saving-sessions/

Get rewarded for using less power at designated times...... nothing to loose if no power was saved so I've signed up.

Hopefully by early next year, I'll be able to consume 0 kWh during the saving sessions by drawing all electricity from Nissan Leaf.

 

Pfft all you show offs

Not in the North East it ain't

 

Where I am (Pennsylvania, USA), I can shop around for power. Recently, I've turned to locking in fixed rate contracts for 3+ years at a time. The power companies all wait until your contract is up and then jack up the price by 100% or more. I swear, all their profit comes from the one month that you haven't switched companies yet.

I'm also in the middle of a major home renovation and addition and I've removed all gas from my house in the process. I'll be running on 100% electricity. In the future, I plan to put up a solar array on a pergola above my roof deck, but I don't have the money for that right now. I'm hoping that adding insulation to what was previously a completely uninsulated house will help a ton with power bills. I'm also doing a lot to tighten up the envelope of the house so that I don't lose all my conditioned air to the outside.

Switching to all electric means I'm getting a hybrid (heat pump) water heater and induction cooktop, both of which will be much cheaper to run than the old gas versions I had. Same for the heat pump AC/Heating system. More than that, the gas company charged $35/month just to be a customer, so getting rid of gas will save me $420/year from that fee alone.

Beyond that, I'll probably shut down my office PC when I'm not using it. I used to keep it on all the time, but I've been using it less and less over the years and sticking to my HTPC and laptop for most of what I do. I have a Drobo Pro connected to the HTPC that I know is an energy hog, but I run my server off of it so it's going to stay on.

I'm hoping that the tradeoff between the increased volume/surface area of the home vs the increased efficiency will result in power bills that are the same as before the renovation.

 

New UK budget: £3000 fixed "average annual household" energy bill from April 2023 for 1 year.
Up from £2500 fixed - £400 support.

Seems a sensible shock absorber. I don't think energy prices will ever be low. So insulate, insulate and insulate!

 

The longer the government subsidises bills the longer companies will get away with keeping them inflated (even if wholesale prices eventually drop). Obviously painful for those who can't afford it but not really sensible to keep the cap going indefinitely either.

In related news, somehow it is costing the government £6.5bn to "manage" Bulb since its collapse. How the hell is it costing so much? Bulb has 1.5m customers so that's circa £4k per customer. Even giving away totally free energy for a year shouldn't come near that figure. How bad were bulbs fixed price contracts / hedging that they were exposed to the tune of £6.5bn. Madness.

Privatise the profits, nationalise the losses at work again.

 

£2100 to £3500 (current prediction) is certainly going to be a shock for many.

There is a trend towards more expensive fossil fuel over last year, due to poor investment in renewables: https://assets.publishing.service.g...file/1107502/Energy_Trends_September_2022.pdf

But my energy monitor tells me my electricity is over 70% non fossil fuel year-to-date as majority of my use is overnight at 7.5p/kWh. Vastly different to the average mix on that PDF.
Meanwhile, National Grid are prepared to pay £3/kWh during peak time for people to reduce their usage.
Comparing the 2, it speaks volume about the cost of electricity at different times and the effect of expensive fossil fuel plants on energy pricing due to inflexible demand.

 

Octopus has taken their customers, not sure how that works now.

It's always the way, privatise everything and as soon as trouble beckons the taxpayer picks up the tab. In some sectors we've seen that once it's sorted, reprivatise and start the stupid cycle again.

I really wish they'd split off and nationalise the fossil fuel sector so we can benefit from cheaper alternatives and promote investment away from coal/oil and gas.

 

We adjusted the thermostat down from last winter's 21 to 19 in a bid to save a bit, and just wear an extra layer in the house. So far it had been fine though it didn't really get proper cold until the weekend.

I'm sitting here in my office this morning huddled in a blanket freezing my ass off until I finally think enough if enough and go down to adjust it back up, bills be damned.
Transpires the batteries had died. The house was 15c

It would have been a lot colder had we not had the wood stove going for 12 hours yesterday (because it felt so cold, oddly enough)

On the plus side, it's not even back up to 19 now it already feels toasty warm.

 

I've got an IFTTT button on the home screen of my phone, when I press it it adds a timestamp to a Google spreadsheet, I'm using it to track my log consumption.

Going by this weekend, I'll have run out of fuel by February if things don't change. Bit of a tricky one really as I don't want to run out, but I also don't want to store leftover logs until next winter. That and anything could happen with the weather

 

The house isn't/wasn't 19/21 all in all, that's just what I've worked out the thermostat needs to be set at to have a general level of comfort throughout.
The actual in-room temp is back up to 17 now and feeling pretty pleasant.

I would ideally like to be in bare feet and a t-shirt year round, a luxury that I had at the last house where the heating barely ever came on with its superb insulation. Sadly it cannot be done here, certainly not with current gas prices.

 

Home office is currently 16 degrees, I've started to wear my slippers and still have my thermals in reserve for when it gets cold