Living on a budget is tricky. Often the winter months are particularly hard for families.
This is largely because, as well as all of the usual bills, you have to find money for the festive season and new warm clothes. Not to mention the fact that your power and fuel bills soar as you use more gas, electric or heating oil to heat your home.
If you are struggling to keep your fuel bills manageable, please read on. Below we explain how to work out where your money is going so that you are able to take targeted action to get your bills down.
Control the usage
Knowing which appliances are using the most power is an important part of keeping consumption under control. It is now possible to monitor your electricity usage with the help of a smart monitor.
These clever gadgets tell you how much power you are using at any point of the day or night. If you see your consumption suddenly jump up, you can go round turning off any appliances that you do not actually need to have on. You can find out more about buying and using electricity monitors to help you to reduce your bill from this page.
If you want to find out how much electricity specific devices are using you can do so using smart plugs. They look very much like the type of adapter you use when abroad. But, they monitor how much power your appliance is drawing, which allows you to work out whether you need to limit their use.
If you want to work out how much your oil fired heating costs to run, at the start of the week, record how much oil is in the tank. After 7 days, take another reading and subtract that figure from the first. This will tell you how many liters of oil you have used. You can then multiply that figure by the price you paid.
This simple calculation enables you to determine whether it is cheaper to heat your home using oil, or if you are better off using another heat source. Because the prices of oil, gas, and electricity fluctuate, you should carry out a review like this every few months. Taking this approach will maximize your savings.
Shop around for the best deal
As well as working out where the money is going you should always shop around for the best deals. You need to do this for each type of power or fuel that you use. You can also find out about home heating oil prices from Emo Oil, and use gas and electric comparison websites to help you to reduce the cost of heating your home.
Stop the heat leaking out
Keeping the heat in is one of the easiest and fastest ways to reduce your fuel bills. Over the past few years, the cost of insulation products has fallen drastically, while the cost of power has risen steeply. As a result, any insulation you install will pay for itself very quickly.
None of the above suggestions is prohibitively expensive or time-consuming to implement. Therefore, they are a good way for most homeowners to gain better control of how much power they use.
