Top tips for saving money on your bills this winter

We are all aware that the cost of living is increasing. So, what can we do to cut down on our home energy bills?

The Robert Watts team have pulled together their top tips on how to save money on your energy bills this winter.

1. Use your home appliances more efficiently.

How you use your home appliances can help you make a significant saving on your energy bills over the year. There are lots of easy ways to use your appliances more efficiently. Here are just a few of them:

• Don’t run your dishwasher until it is full. This could seem like an obvious tip, but reducing your dishwasher usage by just one wash a week could save you up to £27 on your bill each year.
• Utilise your microwave where possible. Cooking with the microwave uses a lot less energy than your oven.
• Avoid using the tumble drier as much as possible. Choosing to dry your clothes on already warm radiators or on drying racks could save you roughly £70 per year.
• Switch to washing your clothes on 30ºC and use the washing machine less frequently. Similar to your dishwasher, it is better to do less frequent, but larger, loads of washing.
• Look for eco settings on your appliances. These settings are designed to reduce the amount of energy your appliance uses while running.

2. Only heat the rooms you are using.

 Be honest with yourself about the rooms you actually NEED to heat in your house. Think about where you spend the most time and only spend money warming up those spaces. One way to do this is turn down, or turn off completely, radiators in rooms that you are not using if you have radiators with thermostats fitted. Also, make sure to regularly bleed your radiators to ensure they are running as efficiently as possible.

Closing the doors between rooms and eliminating draughts will also help your heating system to perform more efficiently and save you money. The better you can contain heat in your room, the less energy you will spend keeping it warm.

3. Turn down the thermostat and don’t heat an empty home!

Unless you work from home, chances are that for a large percentage of each day your home is empty. There is no point in spending money heating a property that nobody is using. Instead, take a look at the settings on your boiler and thermostat and set your heating to be on when you will actually be at home.

Turning down your thermostat by just a couple of degrees can also help you reduce the cost of your heating bill. If you have a smart thermostat, you should also be able to set your heating to turn on only once the temperature in your house has dropped below a certain point.

4. Check that your home is correctly insulated

There are three different types of home insulation you can have fitted: loft insulation, cavity wall insulation, and solid wall insulation. Loft insulation is the cheapest to have installed and on a detached home could save you up to £590 a year.

If you have more money to spend on insulating your home, replacing your single-glazed windows and doors with double-glazed products can also help keep heat inside your home.  When replacing your windows, make sure to check the U-value. This number tells you how efficient the windows are – the lower the number the less heat you are losing through your windows.

5. Replace your lightbulbs with energy-efficient LEDs

LED lightbulbs use roughly half of the energy as the larger energy-saving bulbs. Information from the MoneySavingExpert website tells us that switching to LED lightbulbs and turning off lights could reduce your energy bills by £27

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