[retrotecchie]

@Andy65

I'm just glad I'm not heating my home using either electricity or gas. I keep the place at a nice comfortable 16°C during the day and a cooler 14°C at night.

Despite the increase in oil prices, heating my home with heating oil is costing me just a shade under 7p per kWh and no daily standing charges. Unless you have access to free firewood for a log burner, heating oil is currently the cheapest way to heat your house and get hot water.

76% of the population in my area use heating oil as we are not on the gas grid. Sure, we nearly had heart attacks back in February if we wanted to buy oil, but since April we've been quids in. I did some back of envelope calculations and having oil is saving me almost £200 a year compared to what I'd be paying for gas, much more now the caps have gone up.

And all those who went down the heat pump route are possibly regretting it now, with electricity costing what it does.

[meldrewreborn]

@retrotecchie
Gas has been the fuel of choice for heating for many decades. The current high prices are the result of unusual factors which will be resolved in the medium term. As to heat pumps in the right areas with access to cheap economy 7 pricing ( less than 9p in some regions) with a few storage heaters thrown in it could be a viable alternative to a gas boiler. but i’ll Not rush to adopt, not because it’s said to be a new technology - it isn’t - but because of the uncertainty over fuel pricing and taxation Thereof.

[Andy65]

@meldrewreborn

I would be surprised if gas ever dips below 7p per kWh again and I similarly expect small reductions in electricity. We'll be taken advantage of in the same way that we are currently with Petrol and Diesel.
@retrotecchie

You know as well as I do it's not just the type of fuel you use, it's how you use it. Turning things off/down seems difficult for some.

[theunknowntech]

I'm lucky. My underfloor heating is really cozy and it's not wired up to my electricity supply. It's actually wired up to the landlord meter instead, so I can use as much as I want and not pay any extra! XD

Same with my lighting as well actually...

But all the other stuff is wired to my meter. :)

[retrotecchie]

Nice. I'm in a slightly different position as I have more than one meter.

Something I have always done is sub-metered my house. In a previous life, I had teenagers in the house, and each of their bedrooms was on a radial circuit rather than a ring. I fitted both their rooms with a sub-meter, and then every month could explain to them in actual pounds and pence the consequences of clearing off out and leaving their computers, consoles and TVs on. They had a monthly 'pocket money' allowance, and a monthly 'leccy allowance. If they used more electricity than they were allowed, the excess was deducted from their pocket money. If they were under, I promised them I would credit them against the following month, or give them the cash. They were never under. It wasn't me being 'tight', but trying to reduce their sheer waste of energy...the X-box and Play Stations left on all the time used more energy than the tumble drier!

One of them was a bit cute, but I easily spotted the extension lead he'd run into his brother's room to try and bypass his meter.

Even now, with just me and SWMBO in the house, I sub-meter as I work from home and my office and workshop is fed via a separate meter. Whatever is used for business is paid for by someone else!

Even the garden shed has a sub-meter so we can track how much energy we use for garden-related stuff...powering a strimmer, charging cordless tool batteries and running a pond pump in summer.

In these austere times, every watt-hour needs to be accounted for.

[theunknowntech]

Well, that's why myself and Blastoise186 use Nintendo games consoles - because they're something like 5,000% less power hungry than Xbox and PlayStation performance monsters are. Our Ubiquiti UniFi setups also allow us to monitor how many Watts are being pulled via Power over Ethernet and the datasheets for everything else give us all the data we need.

And then Blastoise went and got himself a laptop that needs a 180W power brick... He's bonkers!

[retrotecchie]

I thought my laptop was power hungry at 65w. Most of what I do (like tatting about online) I manage to do on an Atom based Windows tablet with a 5w brick.

Of course, for 'proper work' I do need to use 'real' computers and 16 core Xeon servers and i7 high performance workstations are a bit more thirsty!

Then again with several 'pooters (and three moniters per 'pooter) running, plus the server and associated network hardware, I don't need to heat the office.

[theunknowntech]

Well, Blastoise has an ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 Alan Walker Special Edition, so effectively a gaming laptop. And a very overpowered one at that. But given it's got an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS in it (8 core/16 Thread @ 3.3GHz Base Clock/4.5GHz Turbo), Samurott (as he calls it) actually doesn't use all that much juice! :P

He's also got 180W of Power over Ethernet capacity from three network switches, enough Ubiquiti UniFi wired and Wi-Fi kit to run an entire office building and some other crazy stuff... He's bonkers! How on earth he manages to pay less than £40 a month for electricity I'll never know.

[retrotecchie]

With a laptop like that, no need for central heating ;-)

[theunknowntech]

Nah, it actually never gets that warm! Liquid metal cooling and tons of ventilation means the system never gets that hot. He actually just sent me this as proof.