We’ve had several Sust-it users asking us why you can’t get hot fill washing machines any more. I must admit we went through the same process when replacing our worn-out washing machine a few years back. We had a very reliable Zanussi washing machine for over 19 years, which had a hot water feed, which was a real plus as our heating system at the time (which was not very eco-friendly, I must say!) was always generating a constant supply of hot water. The advantage was we weren’t wasting electricity, by reheating water within the washing machine.
We are now using a ground source heat pump to create our hot water supply, which is far more efficient than the heating elements in our washing machine! As would be a solar, wood pellet or even an efficient gas combi boiler! Unfortunately, at the time we needed to replace the Zanussi we could not source a hot feed supply washing machine. This was probably due cost cutting by manufacturers, and perversely the effect of energy labels which did not have a testing procedure for hot water supply machines.
So if you have a greener supply of hot water, what are the potential saving? One Sust-it user made contact, had a 12 year old B rated 6 kg Bosch washing machine with a hot fill supply, according to the manual, and at 60ºcotton cycle, and it uses 0.4 kWh costing £37.57 That’s nearly better than our best performance A+++ top-performing machine!
You will please to hear that you can now get a new energy efficient hot feed washing machine from ISE, these Swedish made machines are designed to last at least 8000 cycles and every machine is tested at the factory prior to dispatch. If you did one wash per day, 365 days per year, that’s just under 22 years of use! AND THEY HAVE A HOT WATER FEED! They are a little expensive though.
Cost to run using internal water heating £51.61 per year = 134.45 kgCO2
With Hot Water feed connected £28.11 = 44.82 kgCO2
Lighting accounts for approximately 20% of the electricity used in our homes. LED lighting is up to 90% more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs, this means you could substantially reduce your annual energy bills by as much as 18%, if you replace all your incandescent bulbs with LED equivalents.
It is suggested that LED lights can last for up to 100,000 hours, compared with the 1,000 hours of traditional incandescent light-bulbs and compact fluorescent lamps’ (CFLs) 15,000 hours. The long lifespans and low electricity usage makes LED’s an attractive option to homeowners because, even though they cost more, the running and replacement costs are lower long-term.
The 25% off voucher code (when you purchase eight) is: SUST-LED
Let’s face it energy conservation isn’t the sexiest subject in the world. Start a conversation with “how many inches of insulation have you got in your loft?” and the eyes glaze over! However. “How much money are you generating from your solar panels?” is a lot more exciting. Plus, instead of having a Greenpeace sticker on your 4 x 4, the panels show everyone how green you are! Whilst renewable energy has got to be a major part of meeting our future energy needs, we shouldn’t overlook the energy that can be saved through energy conservation and energy efficiency. That’s why it made me laugh to read, this weekend, of the Guardian and Ecotricity’s offer of the chance to win free electricity for a year. It completely misses the opportunity to mention how customers could save energy and money. They want you to use the £635* they are offering over 12 months: No prizes for using less. Just business a usual whether the energy comes from windmills or fossils fuels. How about a competition providing free energy monitors to new Ecotricity customers and a prize of a years free subscription to the Guardian, for those who can save the most?
Sust-it has been showing consumers how they can save money and energy by choosing the most energy efficient appliances for over five years; Energy conservation and energy efficiency makes sense but not enough money. That’s why, as a report from the Association for the Conservation of Energy has noted of the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) that: “The vast majority of senior staff are assigned to energy generation rather than energy saving”.? And there is no clear target or ambition for energy efficiency savings. It’s frustrating that so much more could be done at EU level to address energy demand reduction through a more radical approach to new buildings and refurbishment, as Bruce Tofield and Martin Ingham, of the UEA Low Carbon Innovation Centre and Build with CaRe, have called for in their recent report. The low carbon Passivhaus approach they advocate reduces energy demand and energy efficient appliances have to be part of that, together with changing behaviour to energy consumption – which is why giving electricity away for free, as with the Guardian / Ecotricity offer, doesn’t help people to value it or conserve it.
*The prize has a value of up to £635 and is based upon an average price (as of 29 February 2012) for an Ecotricity New Energy customer consuming 4,152kWh of electricity a year (DECC 2011).
It’s good news that a committee of MPs is looking into why consumers are shying away from from the energy market, as Ofgem pushes for simpler tariffs from the energy companies. Ofgem is looking for energy suppliers to have one standard tariff for each of the three payment methods – pre-payment meter, cheque, and direct debit – and per fuel.
One issue identified is that consumers don’t understand the language of energy, Kilowatt hours (kWh) and how that relates to bills. Or is there another issue here? Do consumers know what there home appliances, electric heaters and electricals cost to run? From our experience they don’t!
My first taste of becoming ‘energy literate’, the term being used, I prefer the phrase ‘energy aware‘, was in the seventies (showing may age here) when, as a child, I fed the electric meter under the stairs with coins. If the emersion heater or electric fire was on it was a endless task of finding the next 10p coin (Two Shillings), or a trip to the shops to get some change, as the house was plunged into darkness! You soon got grips with what was using power, as the spinning disk on meter picked up speed!
Sust-it’s website came about because of our frustration at the lack of meaningful information for consumers about how much electricals actually cost to run. We’re all bombarded with energy information, from energy labels, car CO2 emissions, home energy performance certificates, and even the solar panel gold rush has educated many people on financial benefits of the Kilowatt. But do they mean anything to the consumers about to buy a new TV or turning the fan heater on? Probably not!
Energy labels, are one example of how it could be far simpler to get over the value of energy; these labels are already starting to display Kilowatt hours (kWh) which most consumers don’t understand. So why not convert that into running cost, as our site does? The average cost of a unit of electricity in the UK is around 0.14p per Kilowatt hour, so the maths for most products is fairly straightforward.
The other major obstacle to people switching energy supplier is the hassle involved, see previous post. Finally, how can Ofgem propose one standard tariff for each energy suppliers tariff according to payment methods, when you pay different amounts for your electricity, dependent on your postcode! I’m afraid to say your energy prices are a postcode lottery too!
A disreputable minority of solar panel installers are exploiting the confusion over the feed-in tariff caused by recent legal action, and promising returns that they may not be able to guarantee.
These installers are promising that the rate of government subsidy on solar PV panels will be 43.3p per kWh generated. In fact, due to an ongoing legal battle, this cannot be guaranteed. Consumers may only get a feed-in tariff rate of 21p per kWh.
A search for solar installers on Google brings up three companies on the first page claiming to offer the 43.3p tariff rate. There are also many misleading ads in local and national papers and landing on people’s door mats.
If you install a 4kW system based on an expectation of 43.3p, and the government wins its appeal to the Supreme Court, you will receive £20,000* less than you had calculated over the 25 year term of the feed-in tariff.
YouGen’s advice to people interested in solar panels is to go ahead only if you are happy with the returns given by a 21p feed-in tariff rate. Then if the government loses its appeal, and the rate does go back to 43.3p for installations with an eligibility date before 3 March 2012, you will have a very nice bonus.
If a company says that they can guarantee the higher rate, show them the door, or put down the phone.
There are many honest and reputable solar installers who will do a good job. If people want to protect themselves from solar cowboys, they should:
check that the company is MCS accredited, and members of the REAL Assurance Scheme
Get three quotes. Ask for references from previous customers, or check consumer feedback in the YouGen directory.
Is this a prime example of so-called eco and energy saving product that are misleading? How can a fan connected to the top of your radiator save you £140 per year? Doubtful! There’s a clue in the name ‘radiators’ they work by radiating heat – hot air rises, no moving parts needed, simple! According to the PR video made for this product it expels trapped air, now I’m confused, where is this air trapped? Hot air rises, that’s how radiators work, why do need 1.5 watt fan to do this! Saying you could reduce your room temperature by 3°C by adding one of these Radiator Boosters is optimistic! How many Radiators boosters would you need?
We’re all for energy saving innovations, but will a radiator booster really do much more than make a noise, and create for more CO2 emissions in it’s manufacture and distribution than it will ever save! My advice would to make a draft excluder out of an old pair of tights and save yourself £25! This is exactly why we don’t promote eco and so-called ‘energy saving’ products, just to make money!
Just prior to the mad panic to install solar PV panels, we got together a couple of estimates for installing a system. The process was an interesting experience: The first company were trying to sell us cheap Far Eastern PV panels, which at first glance looked good value at £8,258, the sort of prices appearing in the media for a low end 4kW system. It was only on closer examination that we realised that their quote was for not for a 4kW system, which had the maximum FiT return, but for a much lower output system, 1.6 kW. We rejected them very quickly! In effect this would have cost us £20,000 for non-branded panels.
The other supplier, who had installed our heat pump 6 years earlier. Had emailed us to say they were now offering PV installations, the bandwagon was moving fast! I asked them to provide a quote for a 4kW PV installation with well known Japanese branded PV panels and inverter. The price came back at the expected £12k, again the sort of figures you would see around in the press and online. Then the bombshell feed-in-tariffs were slashed by 50 per cent! Let the PV panic begin!
The phone calls started; “yes, we can install your system before 12th December, as long as you send £500 today! I must admit that I thought the installations cost were high, £3000 for two man days of work! (one electrician, and a labourer!). My gut feeling was that panels and inverters should have dropped in price due to demand and take-up of FiT. In the end, we decided not to risk installing a system on financial grounds, and foreseeing the panic to get the panels registered and commissioned in time to get the old tariff.
Then, miraculously last week, the company resent their quotation with a £2500 reduction for exactly the same system! Claiming surplus stock – yet prior to 12th December, other suppliers could not source panels due to the demand to get systems in place before the FiT change. So Chris Huhne was right when he stated that the real price of PV panels had dropped dramatically. I didn’t believe that the price of panels was being reflected in the market place, and expected that, after the feed-in-tariff reduction, prices would drop in six to twelve months time, not a week after the deadline!
The renewable energy sector certainly needed kick-starting. However, is there a strong argument that PV installers were profiteering? Or was it a case of bad green policymaking driving greed and not generating the sustainable, long term green jobs we need?
It seems lots of us have, given that an astonishing 30 million TVs have been sold in the past three years, according to Ofgem. And this is when we are in a recession.
Another little known fact, is that energy suppliers could claim savings under CERT (Carbon Emissions Reduction Target), for subsidising televisions which had a built in digital tuner and a screen size of less than 22 inches. OK the carbon saving the energy suppliers could claim was small, around 0.15 tonnes of lifetime CO2. I can only guess what funding was given, but this amount of CO2 for other measures would typically see a subsidy of between £1.50 and £2.
In total almost 22 million televisions have received a CERT subsidy over the last three years which Ofgem claims “implies CERT has helped drive a significant uptake of energy efficient TVs in GB households”. Really? How many people stood in the store and chose a TV because it had a whopping £1.50 subsidy through CERT, how many even knew? And how many people instead purchased a TV with an integrated digital tuner because of the digital switchover?
A sceptic may conclude that over the past three years most of the TVs on sale had a digital tuner, so consumers had little choice but to buy one. With the analogue signal being switched off, surely most would opt for a digital-ready TV when upgrading? And not many of these TV would be a household’s main TV, more likely a TV for the bedroom, kitchen or even bathroom, or maybe for hotels and businesses, so I can’t imagine that CERT has had much to do with the driving their sales. Perhaps more incentives to encourage consumers to buy energy efficient appliances generally, linking with manufacturers and retailers, would have had more benefit.
We all knew a cut to the high Feed-in-tariff was inevitable, but the speed and severity doesn’t make sense. Just when the industry has geared itself up, the rug is pulled. But it leaves me thinking why was it set up this way in the first place? Why didn’t they link it to energy conservation and require homes to be properly insulated first. It appears to be less to do with saving energy and more to do with making money. The savvy who have had a spare 12K in the bank, earning next to nothing in interest, have installed solar panels as an income generator. Nothing wrong with that; but only if it is linked to incentives to save energy as well. Yes, you might change your habits and put the dishwasher on in the day, but if your house is badly insulated and you feel it’s ok to heat every room to 21c how is that going to save carbon? Or if the income you generate allows you to fly to the Caribbean every year it’s a nonsense.
Has the price of panels really dropped more than they predicted? And if so, is that do the Chinese subsidising their solar industry? Raw materials haven’t dropped in price. The government obviously needs to re-adjust the scheme, as it is running out of cash, and the advise they have been given to ‘save the industry’ is to cut quickly and deeply. Yes, it might get rid of the ‘sharks’ around, be in does nothing to inspire confidence or trust.
We are often asked why we don’t list broadband routers in Sust-it’s energy efficiency rankings; the simple answers is that manufacturers tend not to publish any energy usage figures, and are unfortunately not obliged to do so!
The main issue with modem routers is that they are on all the time, 24/7 consuming electricity. So how much electricity do they consume? We did a simple test with our BT home hub 2, which is installed in millions of homes across the UK. This router uses 8 watts per hour, that’s 70.08 KWh’s a year, which adds up to £9.24!
BT has 28% of the UK broadband market*, that’s over 5m customers, consuming £45m worth of electricity every year!
British Telecom are addressing this with their New Home Hub for broadband introduced in 2011, this requires a third less power than previous models, according to BT, as it adjusts power consumption based on use. That still means it costing over £6 a year to run. Whilst this doesn’t sound much on an individual basis, thinking about it on a global scale means a lot of energy being used.
