Reduce your gas and electricity bill!

This is not a usual topic for this blog but I wanted to share this anyway so people can refer to it and use it. Due to the current challenges on the energy market, prices for both gas and electricity in the Netherlands and probably Europe as a whole have risen dramatically. The prices are currently so high large groups of people cannot pay their gas and electricity bills anymore. In this blog post I'll give some suggestions for things which can help you reduce your gas and electricity bill. Some of these are specific to the Netherlands. 

What I'm trying to do is to optimize my gas/energy usage economically. Thus the purpose is to get a lower gas/electricity bill. You can have other motivations like you want to reduce CO2 usage due to climate change or you do not want to use Russian gas. Those motivations might lead to other choices. There are differences between countries and their regulations and everyone lives in a different house which can of course also influence the choices you make.

N.b. I'm no gas/energy expert but the below measures are things which I have looked at and which seemed to help. 

• Insulate your house
  This is an obvious one and, especially in older houses, you can save a lot of money by this. You can do large operations like insulating your walls, roof or floor but you can also relatively easily also do small things like 
• use weatherstrips
• making sure your mailbox when it is build inside your front door does not cause a draft. You could reduce this with a product like this.
• install radiator foil when you do not have floor heating for the radiators which are against walls which are connected to the outside. Radiator foil is cheap and easy to install. See for example here. It works best if you can directly attach it to your radiator.
• close doors when you are not inside the room. Also remember heat goes up. The rooms at the ground floor, especially if they have high ceilings, are more difficult to keep warm. If you prevent air movement by closing doors, the heat stays in the same place longer.
• Reduce standby electricity usage
  When a device, for example a charger, is plugged in, it consumes electricity. Even when it is not in use. You can measure this by using relatively cheap devices like these. With the current electricity prices I noticed that my home workplace would use more than €150 euro of electricity a year when not in use! This can easily be avoided by using a power strip with an off button and turn it off when not in use.
• Tweak your central heating system
  A central heating system (CV) produces hot water for the tap and hot water for the radiators. The following (Dutch) site has some suggestions on this (here)
• The hot water for the tap needs to be at least 60 degrees of Celsius to prevent the Legionella bacteria from causing issues. Higher is often not necessary!
• The hot water for the radiators can usually be lowered to 60 degrees of Celsius when your house is well insulated and you have reasonably new radiators. The default setting could be as high as 95 degrees of Celsius which is not needed. Mind that a lower setting means it will take longer for your house to warm up.
• Usually the CV has several settings related to heating. You can usually put in on 'comfort', 'eco' or 'off'. This setting determines how long it will take until you have hot water when you open the tap or start the shower. When the setting is on eco or comfort, it will use more gas when being idle than when it is set to off. This can be a waste if you don't mind waiting a bit longer for hot water. Except the longer waiting time, as far as I know there is no other drawback when turning this setting to off.
• The radiators can be tweaked to optimize the water flow going through and the heat it transfers. This is called hydronic balancing. Look into it! It can make your radiators more efficient and help with keeping different rooms at a similar temperature. When you let someone do this, they can at the same time do maintenance on your CV.
• A smart thermostat which turns the radiator heating lower or off when you are not there and for example at night, can also save a lot of gas. If you still have a manual thermostat, you will probably sometimes forget to turn it down when you are going to bed or when going on a holiday.
• There are radiator ventilators which help in making radiators more efficient. See for example here.
• Use LEDs
  LED light bulbs are the most energy efficient light bulbs you can currently buy. Should you have 'old fashioned' light bulbs, you can save as much as 10 times the electricity for the same amount of light. Of course LED lights do not help you in heating your house.
• Replace old devices
• Old freezers, refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, televisions (especially plasma or LED) are often a lot less efficient with their energy than modern versions.
• Use laptops instead of desktop PCs. Laptops use a lot less power. They usually have a lower life expectancy than desktops though and they are often more expensive for similar hardware when compared to desktops.