The quotation for the new window arrived the other day. Or at least, a quotation for a replacement
double-glazing unit arrived. That is
not what we had decided to go for, and so it was a waste of somebody’s time
calculating it for us, but still it was interesting to see how much it would
cost, the answer being almost two grand.
That would be an annual capital cost on a straight line depreciation
basis of almost four hundred pounds, if it lasted for the five years that Kent
Blaxill would guarantee it for, or two hundred if we got ten years out of it,
which is about how long the old one lasted.
That’s too much. Forget savings
on your energy bill, I don’t believe that having a double glazed window instead
of a laminated one in the sitting room would save us two hundred pounds a year
on heating. We don’t even use that room
in the colder months, except at Christmas, and on weekends when we’ve got
people round or are suffering from cabin fever living in the study.
Meanwhile, the papers today are carrying the story of how
much energy we waste in our homes on heating water, based on an investigation
carried out by The Energy Saving Trust.
According to the Guardian, the Trust has found that an average shower
lasts for seven and a half minutes, and Britain’s households could save £215
million per annum by shortening their showers by a minute. Or £125 million if you believe the
Telegraph. Overfilling our kettles
costs us an additional £68 million.
£215 million, or even £125 million, is a large amount of
money. It would pay for a lot of hip
operations. It doesn’t sound quite so
big when you express it in terms of annual cost per household, though. There were 26.4 million households in the UK
in 2012 according to the Office for National Statistics, so that comes to £8.14
(or £4.73) per household. Including all
those over-filled kettles we can say that the Energy Saving Trust’s survey has
shown that households on average waster around a tenner a year on taking
over-long showers and boiling too much water in their kettles.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a clue how long I
spend in the shower, and I have no intention of timing myself. I do turn the water off while I soap, just
as I turn the cold tap off while I’m brushing my teeth, which must save a bit,
but it isn’t at the top of my list of things to worry about, in an
environmental or financial sense. It
isn’t even in my list of the top fifty things to worry about. I enjoy taking showers. I find my morning shower calming and
invigorating in equal measure. I use
the time to wake up, and consider what the day ahead has in store for me, or I
for it. I have absolutely no intention
of worrying about whether I spend a five minutes, six and a half minutes or
even seven and a half minutes in there with the water running, so that I can
save approximately 1.1 pence per shower (based on £8.14 divided by 365 times
two showers. That is a very
approximate calculation). Nor do I
intend to start sluicing pieces of lime scale from the bottom of the kettle
into my tea, or finding I haven’t boiled enough water to cook the pasta, in my
efforts to only heat the absolute minimum amount of water necessary for
whatever it is I have in mind each time I boil a kettle. I don’t fill the kettle right up unless I
know I need a whole kettleful of water, because apart from anything else it
takes longer to boil, and that’s as far as I intend to go in the kettle-energy
saving department.
When we needed a new boiler, we bought the most energy
efficient boiler we could get. The
increase in the price of petrol and diesel has brought about a shift among UK
drivers towards buying smaller and more fuel-efficient vehicles. People are not daft. Of course we alter our behaviour when
conditions change, but most of us prefer to make changes that are simple to
apply, and yield significant savings.
Choosing to cruise at 55 miles per hour instead of 75 on a motorway makes
a big difference to fuel consumption.
Agonising about whether you have spent an extra minute in the shower
doesn’t.
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