SLASH YOUR ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION

With energy bills rising, Nik Rawlinson explores how to get your devices' power consumption under control

- Nik Rawlinson

According to Ofgem, the UK is currently undergoing a once in a 30-year event”. Gas prices have been rising sharply, and this pushes up electricity prices too, since gas powers around 40% of electricity generation from the UK’s major power producers. The precise proportion varies, but you can check the figures using data from the National Grid at grid.iamkate.com: at the time of writing, gas accounted for 43.4% of energy being produced, with wind making up 25%, nuclear 13.7% and solar photovoltaic just 13.3%.

In the long term we can hope that a growing proportion of our power will come from stable, renewable sources but until then, elevated energy prices may be the norm. If you want to save money, your only option is to consume less power.

SWITCH TO APP-BASED HEATING

If you want to cut your energy usage, you might be tempted to start by auditing all of the computers, routers, consoles and smart speakers in your home but all of these devices together almost certainly don’t consume as much power as the central heating. It’s still worth taking steps to reduce their consumption, and we’ll come to that below, but the most impactful single measure you can take is to smarten up your home heating.

With a Hive thermostat, for example, it’s easy to set up flexible schedules that don’t waste energy by heating your home when you’re out. Combine the system with window sensors and you can automatically shut off the heating whenever there’s fresh air flowing, since it’s a fair bet you don’t need the radiators on at the same time.

Smart heating controls can also use motion sensors and smartphone apps to dynamically detect when no-one’s home and turn off the heating, automatically switching it back on again in advance of your return.