Finding the chase and cutting to it

Like many, we got the email saying we were getting a smart meter to replace our old meter. As you know, I’m a big fan of smart meters, giving people the ability to see their usage as they are actually using it. But, I do think it was badly done when it came to energy […]

It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon in September, which is an great time to air the house! In historic times, houses breathed – they were cool in the summer, and potentially, freezing in the winter without heating. But, even in the wettest of seasons, the houses were not damp, if the roofs, walls, and windows were […]

This has been inspired by https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468067222001201 . Having funded a pump myself, I appreciate that the pump itself is an expensive piece of kit, but that isn’t where the costs lie. Let me take you through this. Examination of cost of buying and running a pump. Item Frequency of payment Cost over life time. Pump […]

This may seem like an odd thing to say, given my posts are all about what I/we have done as a family to lower our carbon footprint, but I am a very private person. Being type 1 diabetic, I don’t feel that that is something I can do easily. It’s a relatively obscure condition for […]

I have spent 30 years of my life paying rent: 6 years to landlords and 24 to a bank for a mortgage. Thankfully, those days are over – we decided to overpay our mortgage once we were off a fixed rate deal because our interest rate had gone from 1.34% to 8.2% – as that […]

Our heat pump is a year old (ASHP, air sourced heat pump).  Its present was a service. Now, at this point, I remember every annual boiler service being a good £170 plus what-ever parts were needed and the cost of fitting them – largely opaque on the invoice. Last year, when the boiler died, it […]