Cheap Ways to Use Less Electricity and Water

The appliances that dominate a bill are the ones that heat something or move heat around. Everything else is noise beside them. That single fact makes utility advice sortable: if a tip is not about heating air, heating water or cooling a space, it is fighting over a small share of the total.

Which appliances dominate usage and which barely register

Rank by what a device does, not by how large it looks or how long it stays on.

Heat-makers and heat-movers sit at the top. Electric heaters, air conditioning, the water heater, the tumble dryer, the oven and hob, the kettle. Turning electricity into warmth is the most demanding job an appliance performs.

The fridge and freezer sit in an odd middle. Modest at any given moment, never switched off, so the total accumulates quietly.

At the bottom sit lights, the television, chargers, the router and the laptop. Real, and small. A household unplugging every charger nightly while running an electric heater in a draughty room has optimized the wrong end of the list.

Water follows the same shape. The shower, the washing machine and the toilet are the volume. A tap left running while you brush your teeth is a rounding error beside a long hot shower, and the shower costs twice because the water arrives hot.

Heating and cooling as the biggest single lever

Two behaviors beat every gadget: heating fewer rooms, and heating for fewer hours.

Heat the room you are in and shut the door. An empty bedroom, a hallway and a bathroom do not need to match the room you are sitting in, and a closed door is the cheapest insulation in the building. Where the heating is central and controlled from one dial, turning down radiators in unused rooms does the same job.

Layer the person rather than the room. A jumper, thick socks, a blanket on the sofa and a hot drink change what temperature feels tolerable, and what feels tolerable is what decides where the dial ends up.

Find the draughts with your hand. Run your palm around door frames, the letterbox, window edges and the gap under the front door on a cold day. A rolled towel at the base of a door and a curtain closed at dusk both cost nothing.

For cooling, the logic reverses. Shut blinds on the sunny side during the day, open the place up once the outside air is cooler than the inside, and cool the room you sleep in rather than the whole flat. A fan cools a person, not a room, so leaving one running in an empty room does nothing at all.

Water heating and the habits attached to it

Hot water is the second heat load in the home and the one people forget is a heat load.

Shower length is the lever, because every additional minute is fresh cold water being heated from scratch. Where the tank is yours to adjust, turning the water heater thermostat down a little is a one-time change with a permanent effect. Ask the landlord first if it is not yours.

Wash clothes cold. Detergent made for cold water handles ordinary laundry, and heating the water is the expensive part of a wash rather than the drum turning.

Skip the tumble dryer where you can. An airer near a warm room, or a line outside, costs nothing to run. If the dryer is unavoidable, spin the load harder first so it goes in carrying less water.

Report a dripping hot tap the week you notice it. That is heated water leaving the building, and a report in writing starts a record whether or not the repair happens quickly.

What a renter can change without permission or spending

Nothing on this list needs a tool, a purchase or a conversation with a landlord.

• Close internal doors and heat only the rooms being used.
• Turn radiators down or off where nobody sits.
• Curtains closed at dusk in winter, closed against the sun in summer.
• Cold washes, fuller loads, a harder spin, air drying.
• Shorter showers, with baths as an occasional thing rather than a default.
• Lids on pans, and the ring matched to the pan.
• Boil only the water you are about to pour.
• Defrost the freezer once the ice thickens, and leave a gap behind the fridge so it can shed heat.

Anything involving drilling, replacing a fixture or touching the boiler belongs to the landlord. Ask in writing, keep the reply, and do not pay for a permanent improvement to a property you do not own.

Reading your own meter to see whether a change did anything

Guessing whether a change worked is how people abandon changes that were working.

Find the meter, write down the number and the date. Do it again a week later, at the same time of day where you can, with everything else in your routine unchanged. The difference between the two readings is your week. Then make one change, not five, and repeat, or you learn nothing about which change mattered.

A smart meter display does the same job faster. Switch a single appliance on and watch the figure move. That is an honest ranking of the appliances in your own home, and it beats any generic list, this one included.

Submitting your own readings rather than letting a supplier estimate matters too. If a bill has jumped and the reading on it is marked as estimated, a real reading is the first thing to send back.

The advice that saves so little it is not worth the discomfort

Some standard tips cost real comfort and return very little.

Unplugging every charger and appliance at the wall is the classic. Standby draw on modern electronics is small, and the version involving crawling behind furniture every night is effort spent at the bottom of the list.

Switching the heating off entirely in a cold, damp flat is worse than a saving. Cold damp rooms grow mold, mold damages your belongings and your lungs, and the argument with a landlord that follows costs more than the heating did. Heat one room properly instead of heating none.

Ice-cold showers as a discipline exercise, unplugging the fridge overnight, and skipping cooked food to avoid the hob all belong in the same bracket: measurable discomfort, unmeasurable gain.

Behavior also has a ceiling. Where the bill is unaffordable rather than annoying, usage changes will not close it. A formal process runs before anyone disconnects a household, and what actually happens before a utility shutoff is better known in advance than discovered. how utility assistance programs work and spreading a bill over time with a utility payment arrangement are both started by phoning the supplier and asking for them by name. And if this month is a choice between the utility bill and something else, working out what to cut first when money is tight comes before either call.