5 ways to save energy and help the planet

Energy saving. It’s good for the planet, and it’s good for your pocket - but when it comes to saving energy, it’s not always easy to see how much of a difference we can really make around our homes.

We’re all familiar by now with the basics - switch to energy-saving bulbs, recycling what we can, turning off the tap when you’re brushing your teeth…but beyond that, it’s not always so easy to know what changes we can make day-to-day to help both our homes and the planet.

With that in mind, we’ve put together a few easy and handy tips that you may not have tried yet that will make a difference to the energy you use around your home.

The rule of one

Sometimes it can seem a bit daunting to know where to start around our home when it comes to making energy savings. However, even the simplest and smallest of changes can make a difference to your pocket as well as improving the energy efficiency of your home.

A great thing to remember is the rule of one; according to the Energy Saving Trust, if you turn down your thermostat by just 1 degree, you can make a huge saving of around £80 on your yearly bill. Other ‘rules of one’ that are handy to follow are:

Showering for one minute less each day can save you £7 a year - if everyone in a four-person household follows this, it would mean a saving of £75 a year on your gas bill, an, if you’re on a water meter, another huge saving of £115 a year on your water bill.
Replacing one bath a week with a 5-minute shower can make great savings of £10 from your gas bill and, with a water meter, £10 off of your yearly water bill.
Reducing the use of your washing machine by just one load a week can save you £5 a year, as well as saving up to 170 litres of water.

Mind the gap

Something as simple as checking the seals on your fridges, ovens and doors can make a huge difference to both the energy wasted and money the extra money by not having gaps letting hot air out and cold air in.

Blocking draughts from underneath doors, letterboxes and fireplaces will help to reduce the need for extra heating of your home, and checking that the seals on your oven aren’t perished, and replacing them if they are, will make your oven work far more efficiently for you, helping it to retain the heat and helping to cook your food more evenly, as well as saving energy and money. Instantly improved cooking AND a saving of energy and money? That sounds like a good deal to us!

Position those plants

Windowsills are of course a great place for your indoor plants, giving them plenty of the sunlight that they need, but if you’re filling too much of your window space with plants it can also block the valuable heat from entering through your windows, which will make a big difference to the temperature of your on those sunny-but-chilly days.

Make sure you’re leaving enough room for the sun to shine through your windows so you can heat up your home in the most natural (and free!) way.

Beware of standby

There are some great gadgets out there that can help reduce the amount of energy your electrical devices use without you even having to do anything once they're plugged in. An energy-saving socket, such as the eon TV Powerdown socket, will automatically switch off your TV whenever you place it on standby, and all you’ll need to do is plug it in!

They’re perfect if your TV can only be switched to standby or if you find you’re struggling to get in the habit of powering off your TV when you’ve finished watching it. The initial cost of a plug such as this (around £6) can be recouped in around six months thanks to the energy it saves.

Deleting emails

This one is a little bit left field, but it's been calculated that if every single person in France were to delete 50 emails a year (saving the energy that it takes to store them on external servers), the energy savings would equal that of switching off the lights on the Eiffel Tower for 42 years! Maybe now is a good time to mass-delete some junk emails, if you're one to let them build up in your inbox.