How much electricity do you use?

Electricity prices here are about to jump by about 20% for the second time in as many years. Increased supply problems and the fact that any idea of competition introduced by denationalising energy supply back in the day is laughable due to the collaberative nature of the energy companies mean that energy bills are getting as silly as petrol prices here.

Generally though, I think we're pretty good at conserving electricity in our house. We make a point of turning things off properly rather than leaving them on standby (Which might as well be leaving them on, the amount of energy used), like most houses in the UK we don't have air conditioning (We open a window when it gets hot), we use energy saving lightbulbs throughout the house, our water heating is an on-demand system rather than keeping the water hot needlessly all day and it's a well insulated house so we rarely had the heating on over winter.

The one thing we're bad with is running the washing machine and dryer. We seem to get through a lot of clothes between the three of us but at least we use the economy cycle and with summer just around the corner we can start drying things outside rather than using the dryer so much. My housemate does have a fair bit of computer equipment on during the day too but he's a web designer (Or something, I dunno, it involves computers)so that's fair enough and the energy he uses like that is offset by the fact he works from home and doesn't burn energy commuting to work.

I think you'll have to accept that energy prices are going to keep rising though and pretty fast with it. It's not just supply fears, it's likely that any form of "Green" fiscal policy will involve taxing the shit out of energy in an attempt to make people use less of it, like with petrol (Here at least).

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Blimey. I just did a quick Google search and it seems the average American household uses 8,900kw/h of electricity a year whereas in Britain it's more like 4,900kw/h. You guys are pretty wasteful huh?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Since last year, we've installed these remote control plug things that means we can switch off all the plug sockets in a given room using a remote that we leave by the front door. This means that the last person out simply hits the button and everything like stereos and tvs and computers and phone chargers left plugged in gets properly turned off, rather than sitting on standby. It's saving about a tenner a month apparently which for an initial cost of about £30 isn't bad at all.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.