Don’t get burned by your old hob – and other cash-savvy tips
Energy bills have doubled and might double again.
Did I just write that? Yes… that’s the reality.
Come winter, simply turning on the gas for a month might cost as much as buying a second-hand car.
Meanwhile, the grants available to transform your home with energy-saving measures have also doubled, or trebled.
But it’s important to stress that the economics of doing anything that reduces energy usage have been utterly transformed.
So check out both grants and energy-saving measures on SEAI.ie
Here are three more timely tips worth adding to the ever-growing list that’ll help us through this financial crisis:
1. INTEREST RATES
There’s still time to fix, with interest rates already up by half a percent and another three hikes of a similar magnitude looming.
Yet so far – incredibly – this has yet to impact fixedmortgage rates, at least not by much.
Lenders have largely absorbed the first increase and fixed rates have only edged up slightly.
You can still fix at 2%, a rate that’s just a whisker above the lowest rates we’ve ever seen. So there’s still time to cash in on the biggest financial no-brainer of your life.
2. SOLAR PANELS
As if soaring prices and everhigher grants weren’t enough reason to get solar panels – there is another compelling reason: under the Government’s Microgeneration Support
Scheme, eligible homeowners using renewable energy such as solar panels can sell surplus electricity back to their supplier. And the price paid to ordinary consumers for this reached record levels this week. Flogas is now paying the highest rate on the market, 20c per kWh, for unused electricity generated by homeowners, businesses and farms using solar panels.
3. COOK SMART
Is your cooker a money pit? It looks like it, according to a new study from food chain Iceland, which has 27 stores in Ireland.
The report highlighted that more than half of people have no idea how much it costs to run their cooking equipment.
The shocking truth is that an electric cooker burns through cash as quickly as it heats up your hotpots. Using a microwave uses one tenth as much electricity.
And it might be worth investing in one of those newfangled healthy air fryers that cost less than a fifth as much to run. Iceland reckons you could save hundreds every year by using energy-efficient appliances and giving a little thought to how you cook.
For example, don’t waste oven space.
If you’re cooking something lash in something else that takes a while to cook and can be reheated later. Here’s how much you can save:
1. Use more energy-efficient appliances – save €327
2. Batch cook, when possible – save €180
3. Use the right size pan with a lid – save €82
4. Simmer rather than boil – save €78
5. Don’t overfill the kettle – save €22
This week Iceland launched its ‘Shop Smart, Cook Savvy’ campaign ‘to help families better understand the cost of cooking, and identify economical cooking methods to make budgets stretch further’.
As part of the campaign, households will be able to attend free workshops which will outline 15 ways to cut energy bills, including five ways to save up to €700 a year when cooking.
‘There will be workshops taking place in Ireland but we’re yet to release the details of these,’ a spokesman for the said.