In article ,
"JDT2Q" writes:
Hi group,

Today I completed the monthly on line meter readings submission for my
energy supplier and was presented with a bill for about £450 for the past
quarter.
I was amassed.
The bill is paid by monthly direct debit and it just about flatted the
accumulated credit in our account since our last bill.
No doubt the supplier will increase my approx £110 per month direct debit as
we are not out of the winter period yet.
The bill is for both gas and electricity.

We switched suppliers a couple of years ago using Uswitch so we are not with
the historical suppliers for the area.
I will be comparing prices again soon once the playing field is level.

Our house is a semi dormer bungalow ( not a very big one ) in the North
West.
We have cavity wall insulation, loft insulation, double glazing, combi
boiler ( 2 yrs old ), and programmable room stat.
Most of our light fittings are CFL's.
We have a dishwasher, tumble drier and electric oven with gas hob.

It's difficult to see how we could economise more than we do on the high
consumption appliances - especially gas.

I'm assuming your 2 year old combi is a condensing one?
To make that most efficient, turn down the heating water temperature.
Ideally, you want it low enough that the room stat almost, but never
quite has to click off, although that's an ideal you might struggle
to achieve in practice. That point will vary with outside temperature,
and you'll need to boost it back up temporarily when getting house
warmed up from cold. (This is what a weather compensation control
system will do for you automatically.)

When you are out of the house for periods of time, are you still heating
it? (Having had remote control over my heating for nearly 10 years now,
I'm somewhat amazed this still isn't a standard feature in all new
heating systems.)

I am starting to look at the electrical consumption of low consumption
items.
For example, the door bell transformer is lowish consumption but powered up
24/7/365 and it is an old style one and not a Switched Mode Power Supply.
I know from my electronic engineering training that the 'old style'
transformers are relatively inefficient compared to SMPS - iron losses and
such.

This is very much a 'started today' project but on basic calculations if the
bell transformer consumed 100mA ( not yet measured it so I may be way out )
and it's powered up 8736 hrs per year ( all year ) and my supplier charges
9p per kilowatt hour ( excl VAT ) then it's costing us £18.86 per year just
for the bell transformer.

You will be way out. It's probably giving off something like 1W.
Using a ballbark figure of £1/W/year, that's going to cost you
about £1.

Our alarm system also has a 'traditional' PSU and is powered up all year.
That is likely to consume more than the bell transformer as equipment IS
being powered 24/7 so, on assumed consumption figures ( mA ), we are now up
to more than £37 per year wasted, much of it on iron loss.
I know that most modern electronic devices/appliances use SMPU power
supplies.

I'm thinking of swapping power supplies for these 'traditional' items to
SMPU's - easy for the door bell, not as easy for the alarm system.

Some SMPSU's are highly efficient (e.g. most recent mobile phone
ones, which just aren't worth switching off anymore). However,
many are not, and without data on the efficiency, you might not
gain anything. I buy SMPSU's quite often for projects I build,
and mostly I just have go by trial and error to find efficient
ones, and discard the less efficient ones I happen to come by.

We have several modern devices powered up 24/7/365, cable modem, router,
network switch and the usual videos, TVs etc.
I am thinking of putting these on electronic timeswitches to power them down
between, say, 01.00 am to 10.00 am.

Modern TV's, videos, etc which are made for multiple countries will
be very low power on standby, as many of those countries now require
that. Things that are made only for use in the UK, such as set top
boxes, cable modems, etc can be very poor, as we don't have any such
requirements. That can also apply to separate UK-specific wall-wart
power supplies for things like routers/switches. (E.g. Netgear products
in the UK seem to come with horribly inefficient wall-wart supplies,
but the identical product bought elsewhere can be obtained with an
efficient SMPSU.)

A number of the anciliary devices which come with their own wall
warts, I instead power from the PC's power supply (drawn off from
a spare disk drive power connector). You can only safely do this
for items which are completely isolated (e.g. ethernet switch,
WiFi access point, etc) or devices which you know share a common
0V ground reference with the PC. Don't do it with anything which
interfaces to a phone/ADSL/cable line. You'll also need to select
items which can run from 5VDC or 12VDC.

I know the real killers are tumble driers, cookers, washing machines etc as
regards electricity consumption.

Washing machines aren't, unless you do frequent hot washes (which
you shouldn't be). Tumble driers and electric hobs can be.

Basically I'm looking for any other ideas to reduce our consumption based on
the info I have given.

All of the low consumption items take little power individually but added
together and viewed over 12 months powered up time, savings with possible
power unit conversion could be worth while.

BTW I have loads of redundant SMPS units to use so no capital outlay.

They may not necessarily be particularly efficient.

Time to get out my AC current meter and calculate just what each is costing
us - then add it up.

Get one of the plug-in power meters. There are several around now
for less than £10. Measuring current draw alone won't tell you
much with most modern kit.

--
Andrew Gabriel
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