10:30am Sunday 26th October 2008
By ivor
The clocks have gone back and now it will be too dark to spend time in my garden when I arrive home from work.
The pleasure of pottering around in the evening twilight for a couple of hours will be replaced with being trapped inside my house with the curtains closed in a world of electric illumination.
At this time of year my electric consumption increases but I am mindful of the exorbitant energy prices. So I have decided to reduce the amount of electricity I use.
Recently I invested in a plug-in electricity cost and usage meter. It's a device which looks like a time switch with a socket on the front which plugs into an electricity socket and measures the cost of the electricity used by the appliance plugged into it.
So far I have worked out that it costs 15p to run my desktop computer each evening while my laptop uses only 4p. Now I use only my laptop after all it's just as good as my desktop and uses just a quarter of the electricity.
My friend put the meter on their TV and video which amazingly used 1Kw of electricity in a week while just on standby and switched on for a couple of hours a night.
To save on heating costs the thermostat on the central heating has been turned down and I have invested in a jersey to keep me warm if I start to feel cold.
To keep the kitchen warm I've also started leaving the oven door once my food is cooked. After all it seemed a little silly heating the oven up only to shut the door on the heat in the oven once the food was cooked. So why not let the heat out into the kitchen? Of course you have to switch the oven off when the door is open!
When it comes to cooking my triangular saucepans have been fished out from the darkest depths of my larder. Being triangular in shape it means that three saucepans can fit on one ring so the cost of cooking my vegetables has been cut by two thirds. I would like to buy some more triangular saucepans but sadly the shops don't seem to sell them any more.
Not only are my energy costs reduced but I'm helping to reduce my carbon emissions too and that can't be a bad thing.
Have you got any good energy saving ideas?
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