Cutting the Cost of Household Bills?

schlumpf_louise asks: "I'm in the UK, and I'm about to move out of university accommodation and live in a house, for the first time. When we move, we will have to pay for water, electricity and gas. We'll still be students renting from a landlord, so we can't make any major physical changes to the property. The house has gas central heating and a gas cooker. Four computers will be running pretty much all the time, in addition to the usual general household appliances. What tips do any of you have for (legally) saving on bills? Are there any technologies that are worth buying for long term savings? What should we not do, or not use?" What other saving tips, and frugal suggestions might you have for a house full of college students?

Comments

Plastic on the windows

[thefirelane]

In the winter months, they sell a clear plastic sheet you can tape along the rim of the inside windowsill. It is amazingly effective at preventing heat loss. Use that.

Re:Do your computers always need to be on?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you should all do is work out when your computers actually need to be running.

Leaking appliances is certainly something to consider. Unfortunately you're stuck with countless bad decisions by your landlord, including inefficient appliances, lousy insulation, poor choices in heating/cooling systems, etc. For those that aren't subjected to a landlord's provisions and can call their own shots, I'd suggest a few options we've learned:

• Check with your electric utility for peak-demand control options: Ours has a wireless (440 MHz type frequency) way to shut off our water heater and other electrical appliances briefly during peak demand when it is experienced, saving them lots of money. By using this plan, we get a $0.06/kw hour rate vs $0.09.
  
• Insulate like heck. Wish I would have learned this trick earlier on. Yes, there's a cost/benefit ratio, but I've yet to meet a rational insulating project that didn't pay back within 1-2 years (or earlier).
  
• Vent heat: Got an attic? How well do you get rid of heat? Our last house actually had all the heat bottled up in the attic because the previous owner/bozo thought sealing all the vents was a good thing. Active fans based on attic temp are good things in extreme cases and are cheap to buy and install.
  
• Blue-flame heaters. Live in a home older than 30-40 yrs? You probably have enough air exchange to use a blue flame heater, which is 100% efficient. Screw the old furnace or even the new 93% unit, blue flame is 100% efficient and uses no electricity! We got one after a week-long ice storm and discovered it lowered our total natural gas bill by 40%.
  
• Get rid of incandescents! They generate waste heat like hell and are expensive to run. Go flourescent as much as you can. We switched out our outdoor lights too (including former mercury bulb yard lights) with this and have seen a noticable drop in electric rates.
  
• Design for low cost: Things that must be left on must be cheap: That's my rule. Rather than keep all my systems running, I have a low draw laptop that's hooked up to a flat-screen (tested to make sure it doesn't suck power when off). I like to leave a few lights on when we're not here - they're all converted to flourescent. Anything that has to be left on must be cheap.
  

food

[joebebel]

If you have a nice gas cooktop and some cooking skills you can make a lot at home. Uni cafeteria can be a huge money drain if you're eating 3 meals a day. For 4 people, you could probably save 50 pounds a month if everyone chips in and does some food work. Nothing fancy, but stay away from prepackaged food also, it's just as expensive and not healthy either.

Seal it up

[gerardrj]

Landlords generally want the property to look good and clean to attract tenants, they don't spend a lot of time or energy sealing up a house.
A few tubes of caulk to seal up small cracks and some stick-on weather stripping for windows and doors will go a long way toward keeping the temperature more stable. Also there are foam gaskets you can put behind the wall plates of switches and sockets to keep drafts out.

Drapes open on cold days to get in the sun's heat. Closed on warm days to keep it out.

Showers are a huge point of waste. A few dollars/pounds will get you a shower valve you screw in-line with the shower head. You can then reduce the water flow when you're not actually needing it and then turn it up again to rinse off. Showers generally cost you 3x, incoming water, heating water, waste water charge.

If you have access to your water heater and the pipes coming from it, add insulation to them. A water heater wrap and some foam tube insulation will keep the water hotter for longer in the tank and the pipes to the shower.

If you have a smaller shower room, hang your wrinkled clothes in there, it will help remove wrinkles and prevent you turning on the iron (ha ha, I know).

Keep the fridge full. The more "stuff" in the fridge the more efficient it is. Air heats/cools quickly and escapes readily when the door is opened. Stuff in the fridge will help the temperature come back to cold quickly and reduce run-time. Also, keep the door closed as much as possible. Standing in front of the fridge with the door open searching for something to eat is a tremendous waste.

Line-dry your clothes indoors instead of machine drying. On a breezy summer day indoors with open windows the evaporation will cool the air; in the winter the humidity will help make the air feel warmer at lower temperatures.

When cooking, use lower gas settings on the cooker. High-heat spills a lot of heat past the pan in to the air. Medium-low heat will usually get the job done just as well with only a slight increase in pre-heat and cooking time.

Find, and keep clean the filer for the central heat if it's forced air.

Try to cook for the entire house at one time instead of each member cooking their own meals. Economies of scale and all; better to heat the kitchen up once for 20 minutes that 4-5 times 10 minutes each.

Low-cost 1/2 Styrofoam panels can easily be cut to fit in to windows to block out cold nights, or to fit around the outside of a particularly lame fridge.

Just went through this myself

[Anonymous Cowdog]

Here's what we did:

* Cancel movie rental subscription (Netflix)
* Get movies and some books from the library
* Cancel old unused website costing a monthly fee
* Scour credit card statements, found another forgotton hosting account, cancelled it
* Called auto insurance company and raised deductible for collision to $1000
* Bought a stovetop espresso maker so we don't need to buy good coffee by the cup now
* Continued living with our old outdated computer monitor
* No cable, no gaming accounts
* No alchohol, no drugs, no lottery tickets
* Pay things on time and avoid late fees
* Remember if taxes take 50%, you have to earn $2 for each $1 you spend.
* Stop buying stuff.
* Get cheaper broadband plan
* Cancel unused text messaging on wife's cell phone ($5/mo)
* Cancel unused roaming plan ($5/mo)
* Cancel unused Canada roaming addon ($3/mo)
* Cancel unused "nights start at 7PM" addon on cell plan ($5/mo)
* Ask nicely and get $10/mo unlimited cell data plan, including modem use (Sprint, Treo 650) instead of faster Cingular $40/mo+ plan
* Refrain from getting car. Get exercise instead.

Lots of little amounts, and some big ones. They add up.

"Living frugally without hardship"

[loraksus]

This fatwallet thread "Living frugally without hardship" is a great start.
It is pretty long, but full of valuable information.

LED Flashlight

[Graymalkin]

1. Think about replacing your entertainment appliances with a communal computer. A relatively low power PC hooked up to a decent LCD can play just about any sort of media type you can think of. It is also quite a bit more efficient than a bunch of individual devices in "sleep" mode sucking down 10Wh+. Turn off the sound system for such a computer when it isn't in use and place the system itself in sleep mode or hibernate or what have you when not in use.
2. Convince your house mates that switching to LCDs in going to save everyone even though they're relatively expensive up front. A 19" CRT sucking down 100W will cost a fortune compared to the operational cost of a good LCD. The less power used means the less heat generated which leads to lower home cooling costs in hotter months.
3. Turn the thermostat up in the summer and down in the winter. In the summer wear shorts and short sleeve shirts, sweaters and thicker pants in the winter. Grab some cheap solar shades to go on the outsides of south facing windows, they keep a good 70% of solar radiation from entering the window and require next to maintenance. Do what you can to seal up the windows in the winter time to keep cold air out and warm air in. There's lots of thermal seals for windows available that don't require permenant changes to the structure of the windows thus being renter friendly.
4. Get a Watt meter. It's a little device you plug in between an appliance and the wall that can tell you the device's electrical load. Plug everything into one of these to figure out what is sucking down the most power when on and/or off. Grab some power strips or switch adapters for outlets to keep these power sinks from hiking up your electrical bill. You'd be surprised about how much power is used by appliances that look "off". Kitchens and living rooms are huge power sinks.
5. Replace incandescent bulbs with CF ones. CF bulbs costs a bit more than incandescents but last quite a bit longer and use a fraction of the power to produce the same amount of light. You don't save up front with CFBs, you save months down the road when the power savings and long life have paid for the bulb several times over. CFBs are also getting cheaper so price is even less of an issue than it was just a few years ago. Make sure people in the house get into the habit of turning off lights in unoccupied rooms.
6. Look into replacing a digital alarm clock with your cell phone. My cell wakes me up in the morning and has a clock that is always set. It works properly after an overnight power outtage.
7. Cook for everyone at once and pick up some heat trapping storage bags (the sort used for camping and picnics) to keep food warm for latecomers. Try not to cook too much or else you're going to need to store that extra food for later...
8. Get a small refrigerator and shop for only one or two days worth of meals. A smaller fridge is going to save on your electrical bill. Shopping on a smaller scale is a little less convenient than bulk shopping but can be done by a single person on the way home from work/school more easily than bulk shopping. It also means you tend to have fresher food and don't buy things you forget about that then go bad wasting the money.
9. Agree on a beer everyone enjoys and buy kegs or mini kegs rather than cases with bottles. Kegs are cheaper than cases and can be reused.
10. Recycle. I don't know about the UK but overhere in the Estats Unidos you can get a few bucks from every few pounds of aluminum and glass you recycle. This is nice after BYOB parties as you get a bunch of free change just by cleaning up and heading to a recycling center.
11. Carpool and/or ride a bike. If you're not too far from work or school ride a bike. You save on gas and have better parking options. A good bike will make for a comfortable ride and you'll stay in shape even drinking a college portion of beer.
12. Team up with your neighbors about high speed internet access. Split the bill between the households and share the bandw

Advice from a British former student

[rjforster]

There are a lot of folk on here who don't know a thing about the UK or what a typical student rented house would be like. Advice about A/C is irrelavent.

Anyway. Assuming no structural changes allowed (so you can't touch wall cavities etc) and assuming you don't have UPVC double glazing etc.

1. Draught insulation on all doors and windows. Find every draught and stop it. You can get thses strips in Homebase, Do It All etc. They come in different thicknesses so choose wisely. Be prepared to get dirty cleaning all the spaces in the joints where the spiders live otherwise the strips won't stick.
2. When it's cold, wear more clothes and only heat the rooms you use and keep the doors shut so you don't heat the rooms you're not using.
3. If you want to heat a room quickly (say you're the first one back after being at lectures all day) get a small desk fan and set it blowing across the radiator in the living room. It will cirulate the warm air surprisingly quickly.
4. Cook and eat meals together as a group. This is cheaper, you'll eat better and it's relaxing to have everyone sit down together after they have all been out (hopefully) studying all day . Do the obvious like learn how to skin and quarter a fresh chicken rather than buy expensive chicken pieces (hint: kitchen scissors). You don't need to be a great cook, learn to do one simple meal such as a Chilli Con Carne, expand your repotoir later. We had a complicated looking list (it would be a spreadsheet today) of money spent by each person either for the group or for other individuals so we could work out who owed each other what at the end of the term. It saved any arguments and meant the whole 'cooking for the group' thing did work.
5. Much has been said about computers already. If you can get to a power socket in the library, consider working there. This would obviously require a laptop but you keep warm, have free electricity and hopefully *don't* have a distracting net connection.
6. If you have big windows, consider that platic double glazing stuff you can get. For what ammounts to some double sided tape and a sheet of clear plastic stuck over the window, then shrunk tight with a hair dryer you do get pretty good insulation.

One more thing. University is getting stupidly expensive now in the UK, you are going to get into a lot of debt anyway. But you are not there to get a degree as cheaply as possible. You are there to enjoy yourself, to learn about life and yes; to get a degree. So have some fun along the way and don't sit freezing in a room when being warm isn't going to make much difference to the £20k debt you might well be facing at the end. Which is why I don't suggest not drinking beer. You'll be spending more on beer than on food and possibly utility bills as well.