I already know people who have to set their thermostat at 14C and put layers of blankets on their beds.
This is an utter nightmare scenario for low earners who are already struggling.
Grim, and winter is comings. With the low insulation standards UK houses are built to (a d it only gets worse as you get older), lots of people are going to struggle.
We paid around 22.9p pkWh for electricity (inc. standing charge and taxes, 19.411p pkWh without) last month and our government is just saying “Buckle up, let the market decide!”
In total we paid £165 last month and it’s not even cold yet.
Edit: clarity of costs
cheap electricity is expensive.
someone has to pay for all those wind turbines…
Gas in EU up too. Putin’s answer to economic sanctions and Nato fiddling with Ukraine. Gonna be very tough for once more the poor and low middle class folks. Ouch
Ours already went up £45 per month how much higher can it go!?
First flat. Only got it from council because i was homeless in a hotel. Between this and the UC uplift i have to choose between food and heating. Still doesnt stop me going to sleep with hunger pains. 90% of jobs in my area are agency based government contracts. UC punishes you for getting temp work by having brutal cuts. I wish i was dead tbh.
Will they ever come down again after the price rise? Can’t see it.
“Energy bill set to disproprtionally fuck the poor, as usual”
There are millions of people who between the energy prices, petrol prices and general inflation on essentials are going to be absolutely fucked.
And worst of all the Tories don’t care in the slightest, and there is no solution in sight.
We’re in for some interesting times.
Got an e-mail to say my bills are going from £84 a month to £164 a month from January onwards.
This is with two people working from home but without the heating on. At most it’s on a couple of hours a day.
Heres some energy saving tips you can do to bring your bills down without spending the earth:
– Double glazing in your house might not be as energy efficient as you think. French doors and other patios doors can leak heat through worn seals, and they can be expensive to replace. Wedge an old thick towel over the seal then shut the door, it should work as an effective draught excluder.
– Old style house bricks are excellent at absorbing heat and retaining it. No this isn’t a joke. If you can find the solid bricks, which are not expensive. You can put them behind your big radiators so when you have the heating on, you heat them up. Once the heating is off, they will continue to radiate heat for hours and hours. In my old house, we had storage heaters, which were basically heating elements on the wall but with ceramic bricks inside. They took ages to warm up but when they reached the proper temperature you could turn the heating off for an entire day and be warm in the house. Granted, having house bricks lying around isn’t ideal, but you can cover them with a towel or sheet and just pop them on top of the radiator.
– Smart plugs are a great investment and they work very well with a Google Home or an Alexa assistant if you have one. Simply plug your appliances in that spend the most time on standby or stuff you don’t want to run overnight. You can then use an app on your fone to turn off or turn on stuff, saving electricity without having to remember to go and physically turn the plug off or the appliance off. I have my entire downstairs on smart plugs and just shut everything down at night.
– Draft excluder strips are a great way to keep the heat in a room, as long as you keep the door shut. The longer the door stays shut, the warmer the room will be. You can buy them from amazon etc and they literally just stick to the bottom of your door, with the bottom of the excluder running against the flooring.
– Lack of proper insulation in the loft and any gaps in roof tiles can be a serious source of heat loss. Check your loft thoroughly if you can and make sure the insulation hasn’t been squashed down. The fluffier the better, as this allows more hot air to be trapped inside the fibres reducing heat loss. If its squashed, it will be less efficient and you will lose more heat. If you do find your insulation is damaged or not properly installed/squashed, it can be worth the outlay on some new insulation to claw back expenditure from heating a leaky home.
– If you have a video camera or a smart phone camera that can see infra red, it might be worth taking it outside and pointing it at your house. Any areas that show up in a hotter colour (yellow and red) will identify warm areas that could be potentially leaking hot air to the outside, giving you a clearer picture of where to address in your house. You might be able to hire a thermal imaging device from a tool hire shop like Toolstation etc.
– Check the age and service history of your boiler, and what type it is. You might be able get a grant from the government to have it replaced if its old/inefficient and consuming too much energy/producing high amounts of co2.
– Switch out traditional element bulbs to LED lights. They use a LOT less power and produce more light and last longer.
– Switch from traditional detergents and fabric softeners to something like this: [https://www.ecoegg.com/](https://www.ecoegg.com/) – our family just did this and we have been able to switch from washing on a normal cycle (3 hours 10 mins) to a fast cycle (1 hour 30 minutes) and experience the same cleaning results. So we save electrical energy by not running the washing machine for as long, the washing machine experiences less wear and tear, and as a bonus we spend less on detergent, saving us money which can be put towards the heating bills if necessary. Plus the washing machine is on a smart plug, so when I hear it beep to tell me its finished, I just turn it off from my smartphone rather than waiting for its standby program to complete and shut down.
– If you can afford it, get a hot water kitchen tap. They deliver clean filtered water to the sink at cold, boiling and warm temperatures. Much more efficient than a kettle and faster, saves a fair amount in electricity each year.
– Tin foil is an excellent heat loss prevention method. You can put it behind radiators to reflect heat back in to the room, allowing you to put the radiator on a lower heat setting, saving you a few quid.
– Turning down your thermostat by 1 degree is enough to save around £50 a year according to Bulb. It might not sound like much but its worth trying to see the results.
– Rooms that are seldom visited can often have radiators in them which are heating the room. Turn these off and close the doors. If you have any doors which lead to naturally cold parts of the house (garage, carport etc) then these doors are definitely worth draught proofing and its probably best to buy a proper excluder and DIY attach it.
– Investing in some thick heavy curtains can be a great way of keeping heat inside a room, especially during the dark winter months. Keeping them closed prevents the airflow to the cold windows and thus heat loss, allowing you to keep radiators etc at a lower temperature.
– Buying a more efficient/modern shower head can also save you a few quid.
– Only use the tumble dryer if you have to, for big bedding and bathroom mats etc/towels. Tumble dryers use lots of power to heat an element and turn a drum.
– The fuller your fridge, the less energy it needs to use to keep itself cool. If its empty, its cooling lots of air, which uses more power to keep itself cool.
– Washing one less load a week can save yourself a few quid. If your not too fussed, wear things one day more and try to reduce your wash load that way.
I’m losing my mind, as my fix was up in October, and I stupidly didn’t immediately find a new one as they sent me the email.
My bills have gone from £80 a month, to £160.
Prediction for the year has gone from £800 to £2k, and the fix they offer now is £3k.
I only have the heating on in the morning and evening, despite working from home. I’m wrapped in layers and it’s still quite cold. I’ve been in this house for 7 years so the predicted usage is quite accurate.
I’m not poor but this has a real impact, I am horrified at how other people won’t cope with this.
Which the government will ignore and only deal with if their voter base is affected too much. COVID has shown us how quickly the government like to react to crises and this will be no different, it might even be slower given how the government likes to blame the poorest for society’s failings. Those hit by this will just be told to work harder to afford their energy bills.
You can thank all the nimbys that campaigned against renewables and nuclear power stations…
Do people not earn enough to cover these prices? What is the average salaries per year in the UK?
Why is this actually happening? I feel like I’m out of the loop here…
Ah yes, the lauded Tory free market economy at work. Where competition improves service, competition and drives down prices. Just like it did for trains, busses, the post office, airports, water and power companies. There are lots of Tory voters out there who voted for this approach and continue to do so, I think they call it “accountability”. Bear in mind the rising middle classes in India, China, Russia, Brazil. They also now compete for energy, driving up prices. Soon it’ll be the same with food, then medicines and who knows what else. This is why it was so important to stay a member of a large global trading bloc like the EU. What hope the small island of 60m people trading against large wealthy nations?
Folk on UC live on £300 a month (or around this) and often less if part of a couple/family.
Wouldn’t surprise me if a third of that **or more** didn’t go on Energy,
And yes still the Tories cut £80 a month from their meagre benefits.
Sickening.
What do you mean “threatening a cost of living crisis”? Has anyone looked at food prices or the cost of housing?
It’s times like this I’m fortunate enough and grateful for my log burner. A bag of logs from the local farmer up the road costs me a fiver and lasts over a week. I haven’t turned on the heating since last winter so I’ve probably saved a fortune on gas bills.
Why aren’t folk demonstrating regarding the disgusting hike in the cost of living? How can energy companies and the tories justify this? The British tax payer may as well bend over and let them shaft them.
The Tories will only acknowledge this after a good number of poor have frozen or starved to death.
May as well whap up a wind turbine and some solar panels in the back garden at this rate, they’d pay off quick.
My highest bill used to be like £80 odd, but now it’s regularly £130
Yeah this is getting crazy.
No matter if I heat the house all day it remains cold.
Does anyone know of a type of service which can come and diagnose and recommend actions which can help with insulation/heat retention?
Thankfully got solar put in when they were doing grants and took my friends old oil tanks off their hands when they “upgraded” to gas. Topped them all up when price collapsed last year so am sitting on around 7k litres. On average over this year I’ve paid about £26pm on the lecky.
Glad I started my collapse prep early.
Serious question, but does anyone think that this might be because as it’s a finite resource, that the energy companies might be putting the prices up to make as much money from it as possible before it runs out? Also the government won’t do anything about it because of the increased revenue they will get from it? Anyone thinking the same?
This is exactly why gas exploration cannot end yet – as terrible as it is for the environment.
“Being cold in your house builds character” – A tory, probably.
People need to learn to use less energy. Don’t use central heating, have navy showers, most people don’t need to shower every day. Use an efficient laptop or phone rather than a beefy PC. Minimize use of ovens and pans which are outrageously wasteful in terms of heat leakage.
I earn a good salary but the thought that my bill is about to jump from £40 to £190 a month from Jan is eye watering.
If I can’t make it work then how will others who haven’t been as lucky with their salary.
If the government can’t ensure people have a home, can heat and light that home and feed themselves in that home then they don’t deserve to be in government.
Housing shortages, food shortages and energy shortages in **Great** Britain 2021 under the Tories.
Guess we shouldn’t have decarbonized our internal energy market so fast huh?
First christmas I’ll be happy to receive a knitted jumper.
Not all doom and gloom though, 59p increase on minimum wage next year.
That tends to be what happens when you shut down your production in order to appease a bunch of hippies.
And still UC for singles is £257.33 / £324.84 a month.
36 comments
I already know people who have to set their thermostat at 14C and put layers of blankets on their beds.
This is an utter nightmare scenario for low earners who are already struggling.
Grim, and winter is comings. With the low insulation standards UK houses are built to (a d it only gets worse as you get older), lots of people are going to struggle.
With Norway’s energy price spike, the government is paying [half the cost over 70Øre pkWh](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/norway-government-proposes-subsidy-ease-pain-high-power-prices-2021-12-11/), which is about 6p pkWh, because they considered the price *so high*.
We paid around 22.9p pkWh for electricity (inc. standing charge and taxes, 19.411p pkWh without) last month and our government is just saying “Buckle up, let the market decide!”
In total we paid £165 last month and it’s not even cold yet.
Edit: clarity of costs
cheap electricity is expensive.
someone has to pay for all those wind turbines…
Gas in EU up too. Putin’s answer to economic sanctions and Nato fiddling with Ukraine. Gonna be very tough for once more the poor and low middle class folks. Ouch
Ours already went up £45 per month how much higher can it go!?
First flat. Only got it from council because i was homeless in a hotel. Between this and the UC uplift i have to choose between food and heating. Still doesnt stop me going to sleep with hunger pains. 90% of jobs in my area are agency based government contracts. UC punishes you for getting temp work by having brutal cuts. I wish i was dead tbh.
Will they ever come down again after the price rise? Can’t see it.
“Energy bill set to disproprtionally fuck the poor, as usual”
There are millions of people who between the energy prices, petrol prices and general inflation on essentials are going to be absolutely fucked.
And worst of all the Tories don’t care in the slightest, and there is no solution in sight.
We’re in for some interesting times.
Got an e-mail to say my bills are going from £84 a month to £164 a month from January onwards.
This is with two people working from home but without the heating on. At most it’s on a couple of hours a day.
Heres some energy saving tips you can do to bring your bills down without spending the earth:
– Double glazing in your house might not be as energy efficient as you think. French doors and other patios doors can leak heat through worn seals, and they can be expensive to replace. Wedge an old thick towel over the seal then shut the door, it should work as an effective draught excluder.
– Old style house bricks are excellent at absorbing heat and retaining it. No this isn’t a joke. If you can find the solid bricks, which are not expensive. You can put them behind your big radiators so when you have the heating on, you heat them up. Once the heating is off, they will continue to radiate heat for hours and hours. In my old house, we had storage heaters, which were basically heating elements on the wall but with ceramic bricks inside. They took ages to warm up but when they reached the proper temperature you could turn the heating off for an entire day and be warm in the house. Granted, having house bricks lying around isn’t ideal, but you can cover them with a towel or sheet and just pop them on top of the radiator.
– Smart plugs are a great investment and they work very well with a Google Home or an Alexa assistant if you have one. Simply plug your appliances in that spend the most time on standby or stuff you don’t want to run overnight. You can then use an app on your fone to turn off or turn on stuff, saving electricity without having to remember to go and physically turn the plug off or the appliance off. I have my entire downstairs on smart plugs and just shut everything down at night.
– Draft excluder strips are a great way to keep the heat in a room, as long as you keep the door shut. The longer the door stays shut, the warmer the room will be. You can buy them from amazon etc and they literally just stick to the bottom of your door, with the bottom of the excluder running against the flooring.
– Lack of proper insulation in the loft and any gaps in roof tiles can be a serious source of heat loss. Check your loft thoroughly if you can and make sure the insulation hasn’t been squashed down. The fluffier the better, as this allows more hot air to be trapped inside the fibres reducing heat loss. If its squashed, it will be less efficient and you will lose more heat. If you do find your insulation is damaged or not properly installed/squashed, it can be worth the outlay on some new insulation to claw back expenditure from heating a leaky home.
– If you have a video camera or a smart phone camera that can see infra red, it might be worth taking it outside and pointing it at your house. Any areas that show up in a hotter colour (yellow and red) will identify warm areas that could be potentially leaking hot air to the outside, giving you a clearer picture of where to address in your house. You might be able to hire a thermal imaging device from a tool hire shop like Toolstation etc.
– Check the age and service history of your boiler, and what type it is. You might be able get a grant from the government to have it replaced if its old/inefficient and consuming too much energy/producing high amounts of co2.
– Switch out traditional element bulbs to LED lights. They use a LOT less power and produce more light and last longer.
– Switch from traditional detergents and fabric softeners to something like this: [https://www.ecoegg.com/](https://www.ecoegg.com/) – our family just did this and we have been able to switch from washing on a normal cycle (3 hours 10 mins) to a fast cycle (1 hour 30 minutes) and experience the same cleaning results. So we save electrical energy by not running the washing machine for as long, the washing machine experiences less wear and tear, and as a bonus we spend less on detergent, saving us money which can be put towards the heating bills if necessary. Plus the washing machine is on a smart plug, so when I hear it beep to tell me its finished, I just turn it off from my smartphone rather than waiting for its standby program to complete and shut down.
– If you can afford it, get a hot water kitchen tap. They deliver clean filtered water to the sink at cold, boiling and warm temperatures. Much more efficient than a kettle and faster, saves a fair amount in electricity each year.
– Tin foil is an excellent heat loss prevention method. You can put it behind radiators to reflect heat back in to the room, allowing you to put the radiator on a lower heat setting, saving you a few quid.
– Turning down your thermostat by 1 degree is enough to save around £50 a year according to Bulb. It might not sound like much but its worth trying to see the results.
– Rooms that are seldom visited can often have radiators in them which are heating the room. Turn these off and close the doors. If you have any doors which lead to naturally cold parts of the house (garage, carport etc) then these doors are definitely worth draught proofing and its probably best to buy a proper excluder and DIY attach it.
– Investing in some thick heavy curtains can be a great way of keeping heat inside a room, especially during the dark winter months. Keeping them closed prevents the airflow to the cold windows and thus heat loss, allowing you to keep radiators etc at a lower temperature.
– Buying a more efficient/modern shower head can also save you a few quid.
– Only use the tumble dryer if you have to, for big bedding and bathroom mats etc/towels. Tumble dryers use lots of power to heat an element and turn a drum.
– The fuller your fridge, the less energy it needs to use to keep itself cool. If its empty, its cooling lots of air, which uses more power to keep itself cool.
– Washing one less load a week can save yourself a few quid. If your not too fussed, wear things one day more and try to reduce your wash load that way.
I’m losing my mind, as my fix was up in October, and I stupidly didn’t immediately find a new one as they sent me the email.
My bills have gone from £80 a month, to £160.
Prediction for the year has gone from £800 to £2k, and the fix they offer now is £3k.
I only have the heating on in the morning and evening, despite working from home. I’m wrapped in layers and it’s still quite cold. I’ve been in this house for 7 years so the predicted usage is quite accurate.
I’m not poor but this has a real impact, I am horrified at how other people won’t cope with this.
Which the government will ignore and only deal with if their voter base is affected too much. COVID has shown us how quickly the government like to react to crises and this will be no different, it might even be slower given how the government likes to blame the poorest for society’s failings. Those hit by this will just be told to work harder to afford their energy bills.
You can thank all the nimbys that campaigned against renewables and nuclear power stations…
Do people not earn enough to cover these prices? What is the average salaries per year in the UK?
Why is this actually happening? I feel like I’m out of the loop here…
Ah yes, the lauded Tory free market economy at work. Where competition improves service, competition and drives down prices. Just like it did for trains, busses, the post office, airports, water and power companies. There are lots of Tory voters out there who voted for this approach and continue to do so, I think they call it “accountability”. Bear in mind the rising middle classes in India, China, Russia, Brazil. They also now compete for energy, driving up prices. Soon it’ll be the same with food, then medicines and who knows what else. This is why it was so important to stay a member of a large global trading bloc like the EU. What hope the small island of 60m people trading against large wealthy nations?
Folk on UC live on £300 a month (or around this) and often less if part of a couple/family.
Wouldn’t surprise me if a third of that **or more** didn’t go on Energy,
And yes still the Tories cut £80 a month from their meagre benefits.
Sickening.
What do you mean “threatening a cost of living crisis”? Has anyone looked at food prices or the cost of housing?
It’s times like this I’m fortunate enough and grateful for my log burner. A bag of logs from the local farmer up the road costs me a fiver and lasts over a week. I haven’t turned on the heating since last winter so I’ve probably saved a fortune on gas bills.
Why aren’t folk demonstrating regarding the disgusting hike in the cost of living? How can energy companies and the tories justify this? The British tax payer may as well bend over and let them shaft them.
The Tories will only acknowledge this after a good number of poor have frozen or starved to death.
May as well whap up a wind turbine and some solar panels in the back garden at this rate, they’d pay off quick.
My highest bill used to be like £80 odd, but now it’s regularly £130
Yeah this is getting crazy.
No matter if I heat the house all day it remains cold.
Does anyone know of a type of service which can come and diagnose and recommend actions which can help with insulation/heat retention?
Thankfully got solar put in when they were doing grants and took my friends old oil tanks off their hands when they “upgraded” to gas. Topped them all up when price collapsed last year so am sitting on around 7k litres. On average over this year I’ve paid about £26pm on the lecky.
Glad I started my collapse prep early.
Serious question, but does anyone think that this might be because as it’s a finite resource, that the energy companies might be putting the prices up to make as much money from it as possible before it runs out? Also the government won’t do anything about it because of the increased revenue they will get from it? Anyone thinking the same?
This is exactly why gas exploration cannot end yet – as terrible as it is for the environment.
“Being cold in your house builds character” – A tory, probably.
People need to learn to use less energy. Don’t use central heating, have navy showers, most people don’t need to shower every day. Use an efficient laptop or phone rather than a beefy PC. Minimize use of ovens and pans which are outrageously wasteful in terms of heat leakage.
I earn a good salary but the thought that my bill is about to jump from £40 to £190 a month from Jan is eye watering.
If I can’t make it work then how will others who haven’t been as lucky with their salary.
If the government can’t ensure people have a home, can heat and light that home and feed themselves in that home then they don’t deserve to be in government.
Housing shortages, food shortages and energy shortages in **Great** Britain 2021 under the Tories.
Guess we shouldn’t have decarbonized our internal energy market so fast huh?
First christmas I’ll be happy to receive a knitted jumper.
Not all doom and gloom though, 59p increase on minimum wage next year.
That tends to be what happens when you shut down your production in order to appease a bunch of hippies.
And still UC for singles is £257.33 / £324.84 a month.
There’s going to be people in dire dire straits.