Our Guide to Saving Energy and Money in Your Home

With the glaring effects of climate change making people think about their impact on the world, more and more people are looking for ways that they can lessen their carbon footprint. The main win for everyone here is that the planet should survive longer if everyone pulls their weight, but the secondary gain is that your home utility bills should also go down. If you’re interested in saving energy around the house, take a look at our guide to how you can achieve it.

Save on the heating

The heating is the worst for watching your money slip through your fingers like sand, and the current energy crisis isn’t helping, but there are a lot of things you can do it about it. The methods for saving on heating range in how much expense you are willing to give to it. They start with a hot shower before bed to warm you up and go all the way to full insulation inside your building.

A middle ground between those two is to switch to an air source heat pump. It will absorb the low-temperature heat from the air and use it to heat your home and water. It can be up to 350% more efficient than fossil fuel boilers, allowing you to use less heat.

You can also look into double or even triple glazing your windows and stopping draughts with door seals.

Monitor your usage

Like any other unhealthy habit, smoking, eating too much, spending too much, using too much energy has a psychological element. We’re often not thinking about how much we’re using, which will allow us to use more.

Keeping an eye on how much energy you are using will help you to cut back. If you have the TV, a laptop, a space heater and a million other things plugged in, and your monitor is turning red, a glance at that little red light might be enough to prompt you to unplug something.

The Energy Saving Trust has said that they expect energy usage to drop by between 5% and 15% during the first year of using the monitor, which could cause you to save a lot of money on monthly bills.

Be S.M.A.R.T. about your usage

Smart tech is currently popping up all over homes. Most commonly it’s in Alexa assistants and Ring security doorbells. But a lot of smart technology was designed with an energy-saving component in mind.

Smart tech, or Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology, is defined by its ability to access a situation and react accordingly. When that is applied to household appliances, you get things like the smart thermometer, which you can set a temperature at, and watch it maintain the temperature by turning off and on the heater as required, automatically.

Another great power-saving tool is the smart socket. Your plugs are all draining electricity, even when plugged into a stationary appliance. The TV might be off but there is still power going to it. If you put a smart socket in between the TV and the wall socket, the smart socket will automatically cut power at a certain time, stopping that energy drainage.