This week is Big Energy Week and Southern Electric is working with Citizens Advice, charities, consumer groups, switching sites, Ofgem and the Government to give practical advice to people across the country to help them spend less on heating and powering their home.
Southern Electric has a number of key initiatives to help save money on energy bills as well as helping the environment:
- Southern Electric’s iPlan tariff is designed to help you save on your day-to-day energy expenses, with a free smart energy kit – which includes an energy usage display screen that can be linked to an online account to help you plan your energy use to suit you, and track how much money you save.
- There’s also an Energy Efficiency Survey, which gives your home an energy efficiency rating and provides tips on any improvements that could be made.
- Finally, Southern Electric has some handy energy-saving tips – did you know that your TV, DVD and Hi-Fi use energy when not in use? Up to 90% in standby mode!
The iplan tariff from Southern Electric uses the very latest technology in online account management and together with the Free Energy Smart Kit puts you in control of your energy use, cutting your bills and saving you money.
iplan makes it simple to track, plan and compare your own energy use. Your Onzo display has four money-saving Energy Tools. Once it’s up and running (and that’s easy too), the four icons you’ll see at the top of the display show you how your home is using electricity. If your running at over your usual energy usage the MaxAlert will let you know, helping you change your habits.
Your iplan online account will be unique to you and you can personalise it to make sure that you get the most from iplan. The easy to use graphs will show you how much energy you are using at a quick glance.
Using the graphs together with the other tools you can:
- See your usage over time, for example how much you used in winter compared to summer
- Set yourself a target for the year and monitor how you’re doing
- Control your bills, with accurate, up-to-date information
- Be aware of your habits and make simple, money-saving changes
You can read more about the iplan tariff here.
The Energy Efficiency Survey rates your home and gives you tips on how to make your home more energy efficient. I took the survey myself and was very surprised at the results.
Our house scored a big fat D, with A being the most efficient and G being the least. Our advice was to draught proof all of our windows which wouldn’t save us massively at £3.00 per year but I was surprised to see that 50mm equivalent of internal wall insulation would save us a massive £180 per year and take our energy efficiency rating up to B.
Why not take the Energy Efficiency Survey yourself, it only take a couple of minutes and could end up saving you lots!
There are plenty of other Energy Saving Tips to be found on the website too. Here are a selection of my favourites:
- The power switch on many new appliances does not completely switch off all the power. To be absolutely sure, switch it off at the wall or unplug it.
- Showers are usually cheaper than baths because they use less water, but there is an exception. If you run a power shower for more than 4–5 minutes it actually uses more water than it would take to fill a bath.
- Keep your lampshades and bulbs clean. They give out less light if they are dirty. Darker lampshades give out less light, so use lighter shades to make the most of the energy.
- Don’t put your fridge or freezer next to a cooker or in the sun. Make sure air can circulate around the back.
- You won’t have to iron everything if you don’t turn up the tumble dryer thermostat too high or dry your clothes for too long.
Hubby and I have already put a lot of the tips to good use and are hoping that it saves us some money on ours bills but even if it’s not a huge difference it’s made us feel a lot better about our energy consumption.
