Top 5 tips to reducing your gas bill
1) Reduce your boiler pressure
If you have a condensing combi boiler, turn down its flow temperature. This is how hot it will heat the water before circulating it to your radiators. By default it’s often set to 80C, but you can turn it down to 60C — or even 50C if it’s a home built in the last 10 years as modern homes tend to be better insulated. This could save up to 8 per cent on gas bills. Octopus Energy have said over 100,000 customers tried this last winter and some saved nearly £100 a year.
2) Turn down your thermostat
Almost half the money spent on energy bills is covered by heating and hot water costs. Turning your heating down by just one degree could save up to £80 a year.
To make it easier to control your heating temperatures consider getting a smart thermostat
- They learn how long it takes to heat your home, and then have itat the right temperature exactly when you need it. No more returning home to acold house.
- They can also be controlled by your phone, which means you won’treturn back to a cold home.
- If you installed room thermostats, programmers and smart radiatorvalves, you could save around £75 a year
Before turning down your heating, consider how well insulated your home is to hold in the heat. An uninsulated house loses about a quarter of its heat through the roof, so it’s worth installing loft insulation or adding to it. The recommended depth is 270mm thick. It costs as little as £20 per roll, which covers 8 sq m.
3) Plug the gaps
Britain’s housing stock is typically old and not very energy-efficient, most homes have an EPC rating of D or below. This tip is very simple: you block up any gaps that let cold air in and warm air out. It cansave you up to £81 a year, according to the Energy Saving Trust.
You can buy draught excluders to put along the bottom of doors cheaply online from hardware shops such as Wickes.
4) Have a shower instead of a bath. Will it be cheaper?
It depends……on how long you stay in the shower. The average 90l bath contains 30l of cold water and 60l of hot water, according to boiler manufacturer Worcester Bosch, while an average shower dispenses 9l of water aminute, 6l of which is hot.
The energy to heat a litre of water to thattemperature from 5C is about 0.04kWh. That would mean running 60l of hot waterin a bath would use 2.4kWh, which at the price of gas would be 24.5p.
Dispensing 6l of hot water a minute, a shower powered by your gas boiler would cost 2.45p per minute, and an electric shower at the higher per kWh price of electricity would cost about 10p per minute.These savings don’t take into account the cost of water, but if you don’t have a water meter then that’s not a factor.
The price difference means if you shower in less than ten minutes with a boiler-powered shower it will cost you less than running a bath. If you have an electric shower, you have two and a half minutes. Best get scrubbing quickly.
5) Turn down radiators in rooms that aren’t being used
Turn down or off the radiators in any rooms that you do not use. In other rooms you could install smart thermostatic radiator valves. They restrict the water flow through aradiator if a room is already warm.
Many homes already have thermostatic radiator valves (or TRVs for short) on their radiators. They workby detecting the temperature of the room, and turn the radiator on or off depending on whether the room needs heating up or not. Having TRVs installed on your radiators allows you to set the temperature in individual rooms. This makes it easier for you to keep rooms at a consistent and comfortable temperature and save on heating bills by only heating the rooms you need to.
What if you want to move away from gas completely?
Air-source heat pumps are far more efficient than gas boilers because they extract heat from the outside air to heat homes. They provide a small amount of heat all the time rather than on demand like a boiler, so work best in well-insulated homes in which the heat can build up over time. According to the Regulatory Assistance Project, a think tank, a switch could save you about £468.
They are expensive, though, with an average cost of about £10,000 compared with about £2,500 for a gas boiler. You can get help, however, as the government’s boiler upgrade scheme will pay you £5,000 towards it. Even with the £5,000 off it will currently take about ten and a half years to earn it back.