Reduce home energy use

Most of us are extraordinarily wasteful from an energy perspective, partly because until recently most of us were unaware of the long term implications.

Decide to be energy economical, or even better, energy frugal, everyone who does will reduce home energy use and therefore costs and be improving the world for future generations.

According to Department of Trade statistics:

61% of UK domestic energy was used for space heating, 23% for water heating, 13% for lighting and appliances, and 3% for cooking.

Click for a larger image
Being aware of the electricity used is important when attemting to reduce home energy use. 20% of electricity is used for lighting, 20% for TV’s and video equipment, 17% for refrigerators and freezers, 16% for cooking, 15% for washing and clothes drying, and 12% for other appliances.

Click for a larger image
According to the DTI current average annual UK household energy costs for gas is £473, and for electricity, £338.

Domestic energy use accounted for 29% of total UK energy used in 2005.

Click for a larger image
Become energy aware and reduce home energy costs, take a look at your past years utility bills and record the monthly or quarterly costs. Being aware of energy used helps reduce home energy use

Reduce Domestic Energy Use

From now on every time you get a new utility bill add the cost to your list. For the greatest detail record the daily or weekly changes in your utility meter readings. This will enable you to measure the impact of your home energy saving efforts.

To make the greatest home energy saving we need to know where and how it is used.

Click for a larger image
In our homes we use energy, especially electricity, in numerous ways, so there are many many ways to decrease home energy use.

A relatively inexpensive and very informative unit, the Electrisave, is now available that continually displays the electricity used allowing you to track down electricity leakage to decrease home energy use, and to reduce your utility bills. Monitoring home electricity use.

This site identifies the many things each of us can do to decrease home energy use. A good proportion of these will cost nothing or very little, will save you money, and help the environment. Some will both cost and save you money, and help the environment. Others will cost a lot but save you less over a medium period, say 5 years, but they will help the environment.

You will probably not be able to take advantage of all our energy saving suggestions, however once you incorporate those that are relevant you’ll hardly notice them, but they will dramatically reduce your utility bills by up to 50%.

To get an idea of what you can do look through the ‘what can I do lists’ which have more than 760 suggestions. When planning to reduce domestic energy use, the initiall strategy is to note the 6 or so items most likely to make the largest energy efficient improvements and focus on these. The cost of implementing each suggestion varies greatly from free, and there are a lot of these, to quite expensive, e.g. fitting double glazing.

When you have addressed the items on your initial list, go through the ‘what can I do’ lists again and repeat the procedure, do this a number of times. Implementing an on-going strategy to reduce domestic energy use is vital.

Continue to log the reduction in your utility bills, try to remove the impact of changes in the unit cost of the energy as these will mask your real achievements.

Can we save the world logo