heating Archives - Eco Thrifty Living

How I’m keeping warm for less this winter!

Zoe — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 13:36:02 +0000

It’s sooo cold!!!! The last couple of weeks it’s been sub zero temperatures in the mornings. All this cold weather has been making me think about what I can do to keep our heating bills down. To start with I spent a lot of time advancing the heating and snuggling up to the nearest radiator. It’s not ideal and it inspired me to think some more about how to stay warm for less!

Ways we reduce our heating bills and you can too:

We have done lots of things to keep the heat in and the cold out already.

We (aka my husband) fitted an extra thick layer of loft insulation to stop the heat escaping through the roof .
We safety pinned two duvets together to keep us extra warm at night. Minor downside of that – my husband gave me a fright in the middle of the night last night. I woke up to hear him say ‘stay where you are’. One of the safety pins had come undone and got him. These combination duvets* are better option as they are designed to be joined!
When home alone I put a thick dressing gown on with a hood and wear slipper socks to keep warm!
And we do most of these things too: 6 easy ways to reduce your heating bills

All of this hasn’t been enough to keep me warm when I’m home alone in the day time though. So I’ve been trying to limit my time in the house on my own and spending some time in cafes writing. I take my reusable mug with me and get them to fill that up, because that way I can make a cup of tea stay last for ages!

Taking things further:

I was surprised that even though we’ve done a lot to keep the heat in our home, it’s not enough. We have more work to do. So I decided two things;

1.I am going to investigate further where the heat is escaping in our home. Most of our house isn’t carpeted and I think a large part of the problem is a lack of rugs.

2. To start up a Facebook group: Energy saving tips and tricks UK , so that I can pick all your brains for tips. I thought it would be great to have a like minded community of people who want to save energy to share and exchange ideas with! It is a group to discuss all kinds of energy saving tips and tricks, not just how to keep heating bills low. Come and join the group and chat to other like minded people who want to save energy too!

Although I have found it a bit annoying that my house has been so cold, it has actually had a plus side. I’ve found that going to cafes is working really well. I stay off the wifi and get lots of writing done!

I hope you are finding ways to stay safe and warm in this cold and icy weather! Come and join the Energy saving tips and tricks Facebook group and tell me how you are getting on!

This blog post contains affiliate links marked with * and anything you buy through them will help to support the blog as I will get a small commission. Thanks! All opinions are my own and it won’t cost you anything extra to use the links.

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Tado Heating Thermostat coming into winter number 2.

Zoe — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 22:00:00 +0000

Tado is a thermostat with a difference, it’s smart and saves you money by only heating the house when you are at home.

We have had it installed now for almost 2 years, and more importantly for a winter. Coming into the winter I thought it would be worth looking at how we have got on with it. Well it shows me how much the heating is on (which is quite a lot), it shows how quickly the temperature in the house drops overnight (which is too quickly for my liking) and it turns the heating off as soon as we leave the house and back on again when we are on the way home (which I really like).

They have updated their app this year which has introduced scheduling, allowing you to set different temperatures for when you are at home at different times of the day and for different days, the same as you would with a dumb timer thermostat. But why would you want to if it turns off when you are at home? Well for us, with Zoe at home during the day the heating would be on all the time in cold weather and that could get expensive. Instead she is quite happy to put a thicker jumper on if needed, so we lower the temperature during the week day. At the weekend with the kids around we find it hard enough to get them to put a jumper on when we go out let alone in the house so we want it a bit warmer, plus the temperature often plummets in the evening.

Tado have also brought out a new model with the temperature shown on the wall unit and you can change the temperature on it as well as from the app or website. It looks good but I still have the original

I am looking forward to them adding a few other features which I think will really make this product fantastic, a heating boost feature and an advance to next temperature feature, they have talked about some new features before the next heating season but I won’t hold my breath.

Would I recommend Tado, certainly, its one of those gadget’s that just work, you don’t need to do anything but get on with your life and it saves energy when you are not at home.

If you are thinking about getting a smart thermostat do it, if you’re not, why not? Buy it here.

This was a guest post from Mr ETL.

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Disclaimer – this blog post contains affiliate links.

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Tado the intelligent heating control – first impressions

Zoe — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 08:39:00 +0000

I recently wrote an article about how and why my husband is tracking my every move and I mentioned that we are beta testing a new heating control called Tado. Well apparently it is useful for things other than just remotely letting him know when I’ve left the house and he has written this article explaining more.

Tado the intelligent heating control – first impressions

We are lucky enough to be beta testers for a new type of intelligent heating control. I like my gadgets and I like saving money and this seems to fit the bill well. So why am I excited to have a new thermostat? It isn’t usually the most interesting of gadgets.Well this one is pretty clever.

Tado is made up of 2 main parts – the Tado Box which connects to the boiler and replaces your existing room thermostat and the Tado App, which runs on your smart phone and is the way you control the heating.

The guys designing Tado have made it really simple to use asking 4 key questions:

What temperature do you want the house to be at when you’re home?
What temperature do you want it to be at when you’re sleeping?
What time do you wake up in the morning?
What time do you go to sleep?

Tado then pretty much works everything else out. It knows what temperature the house is at and claims that it learns how long it takes to heat your house up. So the idea is that it works out how to heat the house up just in time for you to get out of bed. This should mean that the more insulation is in the house the less time the heating will need to be on. It also gets the weather forecast for the local area so sunny days and very cold nights affect how it heats.

Now for the clever bit, it knows when you and the other members of your family are home by the app on the smartphone. When the last person leaves the house it turns the heating off. I have tested this and it’s really good, it recognises when we have left the house within a few minutes and knows we are home just as fast. It says it works out if you’re heading home and turns on the heating in time but as it’s only been installed over the summer so far so we will have to wait and see about that.

I don’t know when it’s going to be available in the UK, probably next year after they get the results of the winter and I don’t know what the price will be but so far so good, I can now see what the temperature in the house is, how long the heating has actually been on and slightly big brotherly when the wife is at home or not I am looking forward to seeing how it actually performs over winter and will report back then.

To find out more look at the Tado website.

In case you are wondering this is not a sponsored post.

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How and why my husband is tracking my every move!

Zoe — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 19:19:00 +0000

Don’t worry my other half isn’t a crazy stalker, he just has a ridiculous amount of information about our home energy usage! I have mentioned previously about how we keep an eye on the efficiency of our solar panels, but that was only one part of it.

We have an Eco Eye Monitor which produces a huge amount of information for us on amount of energy we use and generate from our solar panels. My husband has somehow linked this information up to his mobile phone. This means he knows exactly when (literally within 5 minutes of it happening) I have done the washing, or put the kettle on and whether it was a good time of day or not for it i.e. whether the solar panels were generating enough electricity to cover my usage. I have very specific instructions about what times of day I can put the washing machine and dishwasher on and woe betide if I don’t put them on at the right time of day!

I do agree with the theory of putting the washing on when the sun is shining, but in reality it isn’t always practical (especially if the sun hasn’t been shining for a few days). It is useful though to have this level of information as it means that we can see roughly what time the solar panels start generating enough energy to put the relevant appliances on and we can delay start them for those times if we are going out the house.

The other way my husband is tracking me is via our central heating. We are beta testing a new heating control called Tado. We no longer have buttons in our home to turn our heating on, the control recognises whether we are in the house or not via an app on our smartphones. The theory being that in the winter if the heating is on and we both leave the house the system will turn itself off rather than staying on at allotted times regardless of whether we are there or not. What it does mean though is that my husband can see via the heating system when I have left the house… Sometimes I think he should just put up CCTV cameras and be done with it

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