The present cap on the amount that the energy companies can charge is £1,971. 

On 1^st October 2022 this cap was going to rise by 82% to £3,549. However, the government is proposing to hold this at £2,500 for an average household. Their proposed cap will mean an average increase in our current bills of around 27%. Of course, these will be partially offset by the governments proposed £400 discount, which for an average household would bring the final increase down to around 6% of the average price. This is still a big rise. 

By now your energy company should have given you an estimate of what your future bills will look like if you continue to use energy at the same rate as previously.

Suggestions from the companies and others as to how to make energy savings either require major expenditure on things like double glazing or loft insulation all of which are good but for most people costly in themselves, or seem to me to offer only small savings. So, here are some suggestions which I hope should have a real effect on what gas and electric energy you use. I am sure there are other ideas too.

Heating

Heating is reckoned to account for about half your total energy bill. To save money, you could avoid turning on your heating altogether, but for most of us this would be too big a step. So is there anything you can do to alleviate the problem?

1. Firstly turn down your thermostat by one or two degrees, to say 18 or 19 degrees or whatever you feel you can cope with.
2. Decide which room(s) in your house you will spend time in, then turn off the radiators in all other rooms and shut the doors to those rooms. 
3. Try running the heating for less hours each day. If you go out for a while, perhaps turn it off and, if you have the facility, set it to come on just before you return. If it is turned off in the early evening, perhaps go to bed with a hot water bottle, watch television there or read a book. 
4. Pick days when you can have the heating off entirely, then spend those days with friends or family, sharing your heating at your house and another time their heating at their house. The more people collect together, the warmer the room will be as each person gives off some warmth. Alternatively, go to a public place e.g. library to warm up.
5. An obvious one perhaps, but wear a thick jumper, pullover or other body warmer, even a woolly or other thermal hat around the house.
6. Stop using your tumble drier. It uses an inordinate amount of power. When I was young we made do with clothes lines outside, and drying rack inside for when the weather was bad. If wet clothes are stacking up, try a heated clothes airer. The better ones dry reasonably quickly and are a little more economical to run than tumble driers.
7. Avoid using electric fan heaters which use considerable energy. If you must have direct heat, use a halogen heater which is much more efficient. For similar reasons, dare I say it, try to reduce your use of hair dryers.
8. Gas fires come in different types and outputs. To achieve a particular i.e. rated output e.g. 3kW, a greater input of gas energy e.g. 6kW is required, so tend not to be economical to run.
9. Wood burners can be a good source of heat, but if you haven’t one, they can be costly to install. Also remember you need a ready supply of the right sort of wood.
10. If your house has a chimney, have it swept and start using your open coal fire. A pallet of smokeless coal costs a little under £500, though this should last you all winter.  Smaller numbers of bags of course would be pro-rata a little more costly. However the coal can be supplemented by wood, which can be found in all sorts of places, skips, builders yards, fallen branches in woods etc. ‘Putting the word out’ might well turn up a supply.
11. Irons use a fair amount of energy, so consider what clothes you really need to iron, and don’t waste time achieving perfect creases!
12. Close your blinds and curtains in the evening. Ensure your curtains don’t hang over the radiators or allow a gap between wall and curtain, up which heat can escape.
13. Move large pieces of furniture such as sofas away from radiators to stop them absorbing heat and allow the hot air to circulate more freely.
14. Where appropriate, use draught excluders under doors.
15. Finally, before you turn on your central heating, don’t forget to bleed your radiators to remove the trapped air which makes them less efficient.

Hot water

Two factors are involved; the first is the temperature of the water, the second is the amount you are using.

16. If you have one, combi boilers supply hot water to your hot taps and showers (also your radiators), and don’t have a tank. The controls on the front of the boiler have a means of reducing the temperature of water delivered to taps and showers (also to radiators). Start by testing the temperature of hot water coming from your taps, especially the one most distant from the boiler. I suspect it is so hot that to let it run on to your hand comfortably, you have to mix it with water from the cold tap. If so, turn down the output temperature knob on your boiler (has a tap icon) by small amounts to start with, until you can let it flow over your hand at a comfortable temperature without adding cold water.
    ‘Heat only’ and the more modern ‘System’ boilers provide the hot water for taps and showers from a tank heated from the boiler. These are supplemented by an electrical immersion arrangement in the tank. Both of these latter types should have a means of turning down the temperature of water in the tank. Refer to your Instruction Manual.
    Try to avoid using the electrical immersion heater as this uses considerable energy and once heated, potentially holds a large amount of warm water for some time, which even with good tank insulation, is slowly cooling.
    Check on the automatic timing for the hot water tank heating. Is it what you actually require, or is it far in excess? Maybe you only need it on for half an hour in the morning before you get up and perhaps half an hour late afternoon? Do you need the same setting for each day? These settings will depend on your family size and usage.
17. Remember that when you turn on the hot tap, even to quickly wash your hands or rinse a plate, the pipe from the boiler will now contain hot water, which remains there, slowly cooling. In addition, when turning on the hot tap fed from a combi boiler even momentarily, the boiler will fire up and continue for 20 to 30 seconds after you have turned off the tap. Therefore if you are rinsing a piece of crockery, either use the cold tap or wait until you have several items to wash, or maybe just place them in the dishwasher. If you are washing your hands, why not use water from the cold tap; it works just as well even for cleaning up after gardening or visiting the toilet, and is just as hygienic.
18. Do you have a dishwasher? Used properly, they are more efficient than washing dishes in a bowl or under the hot tap. If so what length of setting do you use? There should never be a need to use anything longer than one hour, and indeed a 30 minute or so cycle should be adequate for most washes as long as any adhering food is rinsed off beforehand. And make sure that your dishwasher is carefully stacked and full before running the cycle.
19. Before using the dishwasher and assuming you rinse food off items like dinner plates and cutlery before you place them in the machine, try doing so with cold water not hot. It may feel odd but works just as well for all but fatty or oily cooking pans.
20. How long do you spend in the shower? Three minutes should be adequate. However, this can be reduced hugely by first wetting yourself, then turning off the tap and soaping yourself all over, then having turned the tap back on, rinsing off all the soap. You should be able to do all that in not much more than one minute. If you have baths, consider using your partner’s water. 
21. As an even more drastic idea, why not, after your shower or bath, turn off the hot water on your programmer or for a combi, the knob on the boiler until the next time you have a shower, forcing you (and the children) to do everything else with cold water.
22. To make a hot drink, place just the amount of water you need in the kettle either using the level indicator found on most kettles, or by tipping water from the desired number of cups. A lot of water is wasted by over-filling the kettle. If you live on your own, you could buy a one-cup kettle.
23. Consider doing much of your laundry using a cold water wash. Most washing machines rely on heating the incoming cold water, which is where most of the energy is used in running the machine. A great article about this can be found at Ariel’s website. Basically it is very effective for all but the most soiled clothes.
24. Perhaps wear some clothes for longer between laundry washes.

To summarise, use hot water sparingly.

Cooking

Cooking is reckoned to cost an average of around 20% of your total energy bill, although clearly the actual figure will vary considerably from household to household.

The BBC produces a brilliant ‘FOOD’ website, within which issome very useful advice such as ‘How much could you save by not using your oven’from which the following has been extracted:

25. Ovens are particularly inefficient because you have to heat up a big metal box as well as your food. Your oven might not be well insulated, so you end up heating the whole kitchen, too. Using the oven only on special occasions is the single most impactful thing an individual can do in the kitchen.
26. If you do prefer to use your oven, try to batch cook, i.e. cook more than one meal and freeze what you don’t use that day.
27. Microwaves, slow cookers, electric pressure cookers and air fryers all consume significantly less energy than ovens, so if you can use one of these instead, will save you money. Microwaves are particularly energy efficient. However, while microwaves are useful for things like defrosting and reheating food and drink, and cooking vegetables, they’re not suitable for everything. A joint of meat or roast chicken for example, is much tastier and more tender cooked in a slow-cooker or pressure cooker.
28. Slow cookers are equivalent in energy use to a microwave and draw about the same energy as an electric light bulb. Electric pressure cookers are also amazing because they considerably shorten the cooking time. Both are also ideal for cooking curries, stews and soups, which need long slow cooking. Slow cooker recipes have the advantage of being made ahead, and are ready the minute you walk in the door. With pressure cookers, dried beans or tough cuts of meat like brisket are soft and tender in under an hour. 
29. If you do use the oven, try turning it off 5–10 minutes before the end of the cooking time specified in the recipe; the food will finish cooking in the residual heat. This technique isn’t suitable for cakes, bread, and biscuits, which require precision cooking. But it works well with dishes such as casseroles, pies, roasted vegetables, shepherd’s pie, and lasagne.

The situation isn’t clear-cut, though. Microwaves and air fryers can’t accommodate as much food as an oven, so you may need to run them more than once to cook the amount you need, reducing your savings. And delicate baked goods like cakes, bread, and biscuits are much better suited to an oven.

Lighting

30. If you can, change your light bulbs to low rated energy efficient ones.
31. Do you have down-lighters in some rooms? Consider removing one or two from each room, say if you have four in the bathroom, unscrew and remove one or more.
32. Don’t leave lights on when you leave a room.

Children

If you have children or teenagers, it is important to get them to buy into the whole cost saving issue, possibly by means of a family discussion. Ask them for their suggestions.

A couple of ideas might be:

33. Switch off lights every time they leave a room.
34. Suggest use of a timer while having a shower.
35. Where the younger ones have baths, let them share the water.
36. Avoid using the hot tap to wash hands, possibly turning off the hot supply at the boiler during the day.

Some of these ideas may not seem to save you much e.g. reducing your shower (gas boiler driven) from 6 minutes to 3 saves about 5 pence therefore one person having one shower a day saves, over a year around £18, however, grossing this up for more people and adding to all the other small savings noted above, the amount becomes significant.

My journey through church and college to this point can’t help but speak to my family and friends. It is clear God has always provided what I needed along the way, even if the way has not always been easy. Our stories are significant, they talk to people, so I encourage you to share with those around you what God is doing in your life- the ups and the downs too.

Along the way there have been natural opportunities to speak about my faith such as with English language students, as they also shared about their faith and culture. Good conversations and discussions can come from being open to one another. I Have felt more equipped to jump in on those unexpected discussions about God that come up out of nowhere, amidst a community group scrabble meeting.

When we spend time with God in prayer, learn to trust in him and his strength in us, understand his invitation to join him in what he is doing in our communities- and to extend that invitation, we can be equipped to share his compassion and hope naturally, authentically, and joyfully with those around us.

Confidence in sharing our faith in God is helped by being confident in who God is, his love, his restoring movement in us and our communities.  We can be confident in a God who gives grace so freely and loves us so abundantly that he would give up his only son for us.

We can be confident on his call on our lives and every one of us is called to share our faith, despite whether we feel we are gifted in evangelism or not- let’s be encouraged that God calls on everyone. 1 Peter 3:15 says we are all called on to “set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.”

We are to share our faith through action and integrity too. Because of our trust in God, we allow him to change the way we live. Faith calls forward a heart response, stepping up for people around us and living in the light of his love. Sometimes we will make mistakes, but our confidence in sharing our faith is made stronger by knowing of God’s amazing grace and mercy to us. Thankfully, God is mighty and will move in people’s lives despite our mistakes.

This story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman offers us a big dose of confidence and encouragement. The Samaritan woman misses the point, doesn’t understand, and becomes distracted. After seeing God people see themselves and sometimes this is uncomfortable for them, so they may become uncomfortable with us too. We can know that Jesus’s conversations were often not straight forward! None of this is meant to be easy.

In attempting to share our faith with others in word and action, we need a good dose of humility too, like Jesus in this story where he sat down with a Samaritan woman and spoke with her. She was a woman, not a Jew, a sinner, and an outcast. She lived alone, apart from community, likely cast out. God gives us the confidence to reach out to people we are unsure of, who are different from us.  Jesus was compassionate towards outcasts and reaching out in this way speaks to people, he went out of his way to reach the cast out. On the way to Galilee, Jesus took the less preferred route through Samaria which had a long history of tension with Judea. Jews normally avoided Samaria by travelling elsewhere, but Jesus chose to go to a land everyone else avoided, Bethany was one of those places too.

Jesus Listened to a sorry story and showed understanding, he broke through barriers of nationality and orthodox Jewish custom. God loves the world in action too.

Everyone needs to hear about God’s grace and hope and life-giving water. Let’s be encouraged by Jesus. I wonder, where you have had your most significant conversations? Could we offer a meal or a chat over coffee with those around us being open to their story and who they are without judgement? And perhaps in doing be a part of pointing to Jesus and what it means to drink living water.

Thanks to Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman, she acknowledged Jesus as Lord, remained in the light, and revealed signs of discipleship. Jesus displayed humility, he was relational and showed understanding, he shared truth and enlightened too. Responding with heart, she desires follow him.

The Samaritan woman hurried to share the wonder with those who shunned her. She ran knowing who she spoke to and what he offers to all, she was overflowing with awe. She says to them, this is who I was and now this is me. This is what Jesus Christ has done for me.

We live in a broken world, we don’t have to reflect for long before thinking about the situation in Afghanistan, the killings in Plymouth, the suffering of our family and friends, the erratic weather conditions all over the world devastating crops, livelihoods, homes, and health and God’s creation. Our communities need to hear of God’s forgiveness, compassion, grace, mercy, healing, restoration, and hope. They need to know that Jesus is the saviour of the world.

You may still feel unworthy to share your faith, but God trusts us with his life-giving authority, to go and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28: 18-20.) Remember, God uses the foolish, weak, and lowly for his purposes (1Cor 1:27.) As Paul said, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

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