Heating your house and saving energy

My energy bills are really low, I average £20 per month for gas and electricity. I have gas central heating and an electric oven. I wanted to share how my bills are low and suggest that many of these are within reach of a normal person in a normal house.

1. I don't run my heating to keep my house at 24 degrees. My thermostat is set to 20. I will wear a jumper before switching the heating on (although I am quite warm as a person). It might sound undesirable but honestly, it will save you a packet.
2. Make sure you have thermostatic radiator valves, the ones that are quite large and usually have red or green coloured numbers on them. They are no use if turned all the way up in every room but for instance, keep a spare room at 2, perhaps the bathroom at 4 and most rooms at 3. Why pay to heat a room you hardly use? Also, you might very well not want the bedroom at too high a temperature which will cook you when you are under the duvet.
3. Make sure you have a room thermostat that will switch off your heating when you house is warm. You might think that having loads of thermostatic radiator valves will do the job but if the boiler is still running when all the rooms are warm, you are quite simply paying to heat nothing. Honestly, this can save loads.
4. Make sure you seal any drafts around windows etc. They don't always make your house very cold but they can make it feel cold which makes you turn the heating on. Use curtains and draft excluders if required.
5. Make sure you have good loft insulation. It might seem expensive but it quickly pays back. The recommended amount is now about 250mm (almost a foot!) which can be annoying if you have a boarded loft but do what you can and make sure it looks cosy like a jumper!
6. If you have any cold rooms (or if you are like me) fix some rigid insulation to the inside of the outside walls and then plasterboard it and skim it. This works well on cavity or solid walls and can reduce some drafts as well as heat loss. It doesn't cost a massive amount and can be cheaper than cavity wall insulation (as well as not bridging the cavity and causing damp.
   

How to Calculate your Energy Consumption

It's the flavour of the day but saving the planet is all very well unless you have no idea how to work out things like energy consumption. For many people, energy consumption simply means whether the gas and electric bills are higher than expected. This is how you can calculate the energy consumption of your electrical appliances:

1. Look for a plate on the equipment that says what the maximum power requirement is. It might be in Watts, KiloWatts (1000 Watts) or in Amps.
2. If it is in watts, divide it by 1000 to find out how many units (KiloWatt Hours) it will use when running at maximum power. For instance, your fridge says 250 Watts. Divided by 1000 is 0.25 or a quarter of a unit per hour at full power.
3. If it is in Amps, multiply it by 0.23 to get the kilowatts and kilowatts over the course of an hour makes units. e.g. A 3Kw tumble dryer will use a maximum of 3 units per hour.

If you do this for a range of items, you might be surprised that things like tumble dryers and electric showers use vast amounts of power compared to things like TVs and mobile phone chargers. You might not.

After you have these, you need to work out how much is actually used. This can be hard for things like fridges which are always switching on and off and for washing machines, which only use large amounts of power when heating the water inside. You have two options to work this out:

1. For things like TVs, work out how many hours per month you use it and then multiply this by the power consumption. e.g. a TV might use 0.1 units of power and you might use it for 40 hours per month = 4 units. Again you might be surprised that low power things when used frequently add up to a lot of power.
2. For items like fridges and washing machines, their usage might be found in the instruction manual or otherwise you can measure it with the electricity meter. With everything else switched off at the mains (you can leave your clocks plugged in!) read your electricity meter and then go out somewhere for a while - do not open your fridge or turn anything else on. If your washing machine, you must obviously wait until it finishes the cycle. After the cycle finishes or perhaps 2 hours, read the meter again. Most of this amount will be your appliance (some might be things that you have not switched off like clocks, chargers etc). Divide this amount by the number of hours you have watched it for (fridge) or simply use it as an amount per cycle for the washing machine and you can then look down your list and find out where you can make savings in electricity.

Bear in mind that a washing machine uses much more power on a hot wash than a cold one so if you regularly use a hot wash, measure that and measure a 40 degree wash too.
For most people I expect that lights being left on, washing machines and tumble dryers being used too often and a poor quality fridge are where most power savings come from. I can't imagine your children will be pleased if you suggest a maximum of 5 minutes of TV every day!!

Government says no to encryption

I feel the need to rant again because of the stupidity endemic in our current government. I don't think it is a political disagreement just another example of incompetence. This article here relates how information obtained from RIPA (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers) does not require encryption as it is handled and passed around. According to our government, who of course excel in every area of IT, it would be "impractical" to require this burden and the existing systems of "physical security", "security procedures", "staff vetting" and "training" are considered suitable for the job. This again clearly demonstrates that the government have no idea what they are talking about. Most security leaks appear to be related to a common theme: humans make mistakes. They leave stuff lying around, they get their properties burglarled, things get dropped, mislaid and criminals who want this information often obtain it without any input from employees of these systems. In which cases none of the so-called adequate measures does anything. The only way to prevent accidental disclosure of information is to make it exceedingly hard to do (i.e. encryption or inability to move the data outside of a closed network). People disboey procedures to save themselves time, they often ignore the fit-for-purpose hardware and transport stuff around in the Demilitarised Zone and as for staff training and vetting, it doesn't really add security, it is small and cheap operation that actually adds very little benefit.
They also miss an important point that actually encryption is extremely simple even using free tools. Even if what they used was not US Military Spec, it would be better than nothing!
Maybe one day the government will emply someone who actually knows about the departments they are managing. I won't hold my breath!

No quality in UK industry

Apologies for organisations caught up in this generalisation but my experience sadly over the past 10 years or so is that by and large organisations have almost no quality control. Ironically at the same time, many organisations have achieved quality certification by standards bodies to 'prove' their quality but it truly isn't worth the paper it is written on.
Virtually everybody I deal with other than paper shops and possibly supermarkets seem to lack the very basics of quality control. Let me sum up quality in a simple sentence, "Quality control doesn't imply that you do not make mistakes but it does imply that they are only made once".
A few examples. Chasing a bank for 3 weeks for a bank card. After the first failed order, a process should have been kicked off and should have taken a very short period of time: was the card ordered incorrectly? Did the system lose the request? Was it sent and didn't arrive? This is major for a bank and should have been resolved, never to surface in the same way again. Quite obviously, nothing whatsoever was chased up, it was put down to a glitch and then it happened again and again. Halifax - hang your heads in shame.
Utility warehouse, I emailed in to change my direct debits and got a reply. Next month, the wrong amounts are taken so I call again and the old, "apologies Mr Briner.." of course, the same thing happens and I have to call again. Similar issues to the above.
It seems that every time I call a bank (I deal with 3), a utility company and just about anyone else larger than 5 people I assume that it will not work as expected, I assume a lack of quality. I am not interested in apologies that mean nothing and quality insurance that does not result in quality proves that as a company you do NOT understand what quality management is. Do these CEOs not understand? Are they inept? Do they employ incompetent quality management and then not have quality management of their own to notice this? Do they accept mistake after mistake and not have a problem with it? Do they not ask why 50% of calls to call centres are about mistakes?
For goodness sake people, can somebody not sort this out. Can we not insist on managers that can manage and quality managers who understand quality? This sort of stuff affects people's lives directly and to be honest will cause people to emmigrate to countries where people take their jobs seriously!

The knowledge of good and evil

Have you ever wondered what that whole Genesis thing is about? You know the bit where because of their disobedience, Adam and Eve receive the knowledge of good and evil. Why is this bad and what did this cause?
Well Adam and Eve's problem was that they either a) Didn't really trust God when he told them to leave the tree alone or b) They thought they could handle being disobedient (sound familiar).
Anyway, they disobeyed and what they received was autonomy, rather than have to rely on God for direction and discernment, God gave them the ability to discern and direct themselves. Not much changed there over the years. What we now have is the ability to decide what is right and what is wrong. That doesn't sound too bad except of course, that mechanism, as correct as it is, relies on an amount of knowledge about the situation - knowledge we rarely have.
For example, suppose you are a judge in court and somebody comes in for a serious burglary and you have to sentence them. You might well decide that the person seems sorry for what they did and give them a light sentence. With the best of your knowledge, this seems fair and square. A different judge however might decide that it is 'right' to make an example of them because the crime was serious. Note here that neither person is necessarily wrong. We would call this a grey area.
In life, we see this all the time. Debates, arguments and politics are all confused and corrupted by the simple fact that one person's right is another person's wrong (as well as deliberate and malicious intent). So we end up with what looks like an unwinnable situation. It is not a matter of simply saying, "It is up to person X to decide" because if we feel strongly enough that they are wrong, we feel the need to object as the numbers of Court appeals show. The best we can hope for is a strong consensus among people.
Well for believers, we have another recourse. God is still alive and kicking and He actually knows all of the factors. If He were judge, we would decide the correct sentence knowing exactly whether the person is sorry and whether the example would work on other people. What do we need to do then? Very simply, we need to defer most of our judgements and decisions to God and let the Spirit and the Bible direct what we decide. This is the nearest we will ever get to impartial judgement.

Creating God in our image

I realised the other day that many of our problems, both for Christians and people who don't follow Jesus, are caused by not knowing who God is. We effectively model Him in our image. We take our far from perfect humanity and make it a few thousand percent bigger. What we end up with is a large version of ourselves with all the insecurities, the boredom, the impatience etc and this makes it hard to understand what He is like. Since everyone in the world would do this in a different way, we end up with 6 billion versions of God even though He is one.
To understand God, we need to understand His character from first principles, from the Bible. As we read about Him and learn what He is like, we then see ourselves as broken vessels modelled in the image of God but with defects.
Imagine you owned a car worth £50. Busted seats, an engine that burned more oil than petrol and loads of rust. If someone told you that there was a Rolls Royce worth £200,000, you wouldn't imagine an expensive version of the same thing. You wouldn't think that for your money, you get more oil burning, more busted seats and more rust patches. In short you would not create the Rolls Royce in the same image as your cheap car. This would be obviously incorrect and illogical, it would lead to all kinds of strange conclusions about cars. Imagine however if you saw the Rolls Royce or at least had it described to you and then realised that your car was a broken cheap version of the Rolls. This would make much more sense, it would logically make sense and most importantly, it would give the Rolls Royce all the honour and credit for what it actually is.

The wonderful Sell-Off government

The government have announced they are selling off assets to gain £16 billion pounds "in an effort to reduce the growing budget deficit". Wonderful, wonderful idea. Oh, did I forget to say the man is a total idiot (Gordon Brown). Now I do not have a degree in economics or a related subject and only know a 'pub quiz' amount about governments and how they work but I again feel I have to spell out to these people the folly of this idea. It is this government who has been overspending for the past 15 years. Why make some terrible gesture like it is the "economy's fault" that this has happened. Anyway, down to details.
1) The amount to be raised is small pickings compared to the actual deficit.
2) The obvious answer when outgoings minus income is positive is to reduce your outgoings or to increase recurring income (or both). Raising cash is VERY short-term and does absolutely nothing to fix the underlying deficit. If you borrowed money because your gran was about to die and leave you something then it might make sense but why raise cash just for the sake of it?
3) Selling assets if they are not required is surely something you should do anyway? If you have a spare town hall somewhere, why not sell it and then you do not need to maintain it.
4) If you sell something like the Dartford crossing, you get cash into government but of course the travelling public will pay for it - the cost to run the bridge will not go down so add in some profit for a private company and q.e.d. the charge will go up. You might as well put tax up on fuel and sting everybody!
5) They sold gold before and it bought them nothing.

They haven't learned anything. They are robbing the country and not improving, I like the way one BBC viewer sais, "he has sold the family gold and is now selling the silver". Why does it take 15 years to realise you can't spend more than you have? Are they really that incompetent? This is really, really, really basic. Are they telling us to save, not borrow and then have a deficit of how ever many billions? That is a deficit, that means borrowing money (which incurs interest) because you are spending more than you earn. Why can't the queen invoke some ancient power to dissolve government and have done with it?