The best "gadget" for saving energy is a sweater. Conserve your own body heat and turn down (or off) the furnace. If you're concerned about your energy bill and you're also wearing tshirts indoors in winter, you're doing it wrong. Get long sleeve shirts, put on two or three layers, get some warm clothing like sweaters and thick wool socks. Then turn your furnace down to 10 C / 50 F. I promise you will survive. Your pipes won't freeze. With warm clothing, you will even be comfortable.
I have a warm water boiler / water heater where I live now. Running fully on electricity, which I have 'made smart' with Home Assistant. First of all I replaced the analog temperature sensor with a digital DS18B20 connected to a Raspberry Pi. I 'calibrated' this sensor with another sensor at our main faucet in the kitchen, so I can set the tap water temperature. Secondly I've added a power monitoring smart socket to the water heater, so I can switch it remotely. Finally I've added both to Home Assistant as a climate device, so I can easily control it.<p>Simply put I've set it up that during electricity peak times the boiler doesn't try to heat water to save on electricity costs. Heating water is all done in the off peak hours with some easy calculations. Also I tend to set my boiler to a lower temperature (ie. 58 degrees) during weekdays and higher (60+) during weekends or holidays. That way I always have hot water and get rid of legionella growth.<p>What I can see I'm using about 1.5 - 2kWh a day for keep 100 liters of water at at least 55 degrees. While the manufacturer of the water heater says the device should use between 7 and 9kWh a day. I really would like to optimize it any further, but it seems that I've hit a wall.
Shout out to Home Assistant!<p>I have a docker instance of it running on an Ubuntu server at home, and I bougth a few pre-flashed Tasmota electricity meter plugs from Delock. I added another docker container for mosquitto (MQTT) which reads the plugs and integrates into HA. This way I learnt my NAS eats as much electricity a day, as does playing Horizon Zero Dawn on my PC for an hour. Ikea Smart lights on half the brighness are basically non-consuming, and the router is best kept shut down when we're not home for a week or two.<p>In the end, small household appliances don't make as big a difference, as letting your car charge with solar when electricity is cheap, and reducing charge speed when electricity is expensive (which is also doable with HA). There were great threads in HN about how you can even save energy by heating up or cooling down your house in advance with cheap electricity during the day when demand is low, and turn down the heat/ac in the night when demand is high, thus storing energy in the form of heat. But as a junior programmer with a wife in an already expensive apartment, small savings add up. We realized that running the washing machine less often but fully loaded, and with the lowest temperature water, saves us approximately the cost of Netflix. Few people know it's even fine to wash clothes with cold water.<p>Ultimately though, our apartment is pretty well insulated, and I would do all the home automation that I have just for the fun of learning. I definitely spent more money (and time) on the server and smart things than what they save us in our bills. Although I hope to apply my knowledge soon at my parents' house, where there's a lot more potential in energy savings.
What I stumbled upon recently is heat recovery for showers (e.g. <a href="https://www.meanderhr.com/en/2012/meander-at-vvs-dagene-showing-plumbers-and-energy-consultants-shower-heat-recovery/" rel="nofollow">https://www.meanderhr.com/en/2012/meander-at-vvs-dagene-show...</a>).<p>Seems like a no-brainer once you think about it ... in the worst case of a flow heater you bring up the water to temperature, let it flow over your body and dump it with most of the heat you put into it.<p>Systems like the one liked above improve on that by recovering some of the energy. I don't know what the "official" way of installing this system is, but I would just put it in the cold water path and have a thermostat controlled faucet to "switch" to the now-warmer-water gradually.
I always click these articles hoping for a new trick. I'm almost always disappointed.<p>Short of getting a newer heat pump, nothing I do will impact my bill in any significant way. I already do most of the smaller stuff.
My Ecobee wall thermostat happily shows the temperature outside and the forecast ahead, and does absolutely nothing else with that information.<p>The ability to do this kind of thing has been around a long time.
I recently just set up a smart plug I got at LIDL for about €8 to turn on only for the 6 cheapest hours per day. Here in Spain the prices change per hour seemingly randomly but they give 24 hours notice. It was pretty easy to do in about 5 lines of YAML in Home Assistant that hits a JSON api with the prices. I use it to charge my electric scooter and battery banks. Remains to be seen if running a Pi with Home Assistant 24/7 actually would save any money overall, but I am already running it for a Pi Hole instance.
I don't get it. How does this improve on the outside temperature sensor that comes with every heating system? Or is that not standard in the UK? Here in Germany it has been a standard feature for – well as long as I can think (several decades)...
It should be considered a massive and laughable government failure for energy bills to have become enough of a concern to warrant a front-page article on national news.<p>These "tips" are good, but target the wrong market. Those who have the resources and/or knowledge to implement them are either already doing it, live in a well-insulated property, or make enough to not care about the bill in practice. Those who are actually affected badly by the recent energy crisis have neither the resources to implement these, nor will it make enough of a difference to their situation anyway.<p>The main problem here is that the government has completely failed its citizens by letting the situation get to a state where a significant proportion of the population is considered to be in "fuel poverty".<p>Blaming the Russia/Ukraine war is a convenient scapegoat but isn't the answer either. Being forever dependent on foreign energy is a major failure for the government, and even now, I'm not seeing anything being done about it. Most short-term energy subsidies won't address the problem (they may solve <i>this</i> problem, but won't prepare us for the next crisis - not to mention that <i>personal</i> energy subsidies do little when you still have to pay businesses' energy prices in the form of increased costs of goods).<p>There solutions IMO would be:<p>* massive subsidies on insulation. UK building standards are shocking by European standards, but the good thing about it is that incremental improvements are both possible (no need to demolish the building) and don't require scarce materials so no supply chain concerns there, merely money concerns the government <i>can</i> subsidize<p>* solar subsidies, and actually making feed-in tariffs competitive to encourage people to invest in it. This would reduce our energy dependency during the day (which conveniently is when the demand is the highest).<p>Government borrowing for the above points makes sense because it can and will be paid back down the line (solar lasts 10+ years and efficiency decreases gradually, so you'll get <i>something</i> out of it even 30 years later), unlike stupidly subsidizing people's energy bills without addressing the root cause which will be a one-off expense with no expected return.
While the gadget that adjusts the flow return temperature is a great idea, it basically means that the radiators in the house aren't big enough. Either the radiators were installed in an age where condensing boilers were unusual and the boiler upgraded later, or the installer didn't do their calculations correctly. Bigger radiators allow the same heat output using a lower more efficient flow temperature.
The english version of "cook your pasta without boiling water"?<p><a href="https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2022/09/02/news/gas_pasta_senza_fuoco_giorgio_parisi-363880856/" rel="nofollow">https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2022/09/02/news/gas_pasta_...</a>
My utility recently made smart-meter metrics available (even raw data feeds) with 15min resolution for all energy use and pricing. It's been incredibly helpful, however my biggest electricity hog is my refrigerator.<p>However, the hardest thing to do when figuring out what uses / wastes electricity in your home is establishing a baseline with the most appliances / systems turned off as possible.<p>My apt is well insulated, but for me it's still crazy (even packing the fridge with as much thermal mass as possible), and furnace / AC turned off at the breaker my apt still uses around 8KWH per day. Water heaters and refrigerators have a long way to go! Curiously, leaving my AC / furnace completely off or on at about 80% cooling a 20F delta uses very little power, exciting how efficient modern climate control is :).
Pretty nice for a DIY project, but it turns out that the first guy in the article uses an Alpha e-tec boiler, for which the manufacturer also sells a "weather compensation probe" to adjust the heat output according to outside temperature.
It's just under £45.
IME, the most useful way to keep your energy usage down is to get an energy monitor. Almost akin to seeing how fast your electricity meter spins, it's enlightening to see how much money you're spending per hour/day/month in real time.
What ends up being ok for me in my apartment is an inexpensive 'dumb' space heater on a wifi plug and a room fan with a temperature sensor I made with an ESP32 on it all tied into home assistant to be a 'smart' thermostat. I have baseboard heating and its set up terrible in this apartment.
Isn't it simpler to just get a thermostat that will turn heating on/off based on the indoor temperature?<p>Most heating systems where I am have one...
my power company installed one of these devices on my water heater this year as a pilot program completely free.<p>so far i haven't noticed any difference, but i think that's the point.