Don't Pay Through your Nose for your Gas and Electricity - Use your Brain Instead
In the cash-strapped UK of the last couple of years, many families await the arrival of their electricity and gas bills with a lot of fear and trepidation. How much will it be this time, they ask themselves. It is as if they have no control of their own fate, or their household bills.
Yet we can all take some encouragement from Chancellor Darling's gesture in his pre-budget speech last week when he offered UK families a potential £400 bonus to as many as 125,000 UK households designated to allow them to upgrade their old and dilapidated 'band G' gas heating boilers.
Darling is taking the long term view that replacing older models with energy-efficient boilers will have the dual effect of reducing energy use and the inflated bills that go with it, as well as curbing harmful carbon emissions. The message that Darling is sending to the UK public is fairly straightforward: If you invest in your household equipment it will pretty soon begin to bring returns and what used to be considered "unavoidable fixed costs" in paying your gas and electricity bills will begin to reduce.
Although it is very possible to upgrade energy efficiency around the home without major cash outlays, there are many instances when pre-empting a situation will make tremendous sense, instead of burying your head in the sand because of short-term cash woes. Take a lead from Alasdair Darling by taking the long term view, and you might discover that you will be saving, instead of wasting, money.
For example, if your refrigerator is more than 15 years old then buying a new one could save you about £5.00 a month. Not a lot, you might say, when compared with the cost of buying a new fridge, and you might be right. But only in the short term; in the long term, you will have to buy a new fridge anyway, and the fiver you save every month will probably make a dent in the cost of a new model.
Updating any of your heating and cooling equipment, as well as major appliances, has to be looked upon as an investment and not a cost. Listen to Alasdair Darling; he didn't get to be chancellor for nothing!
| |
^Top | |
 |
© 2011 | An Affiliate of British Gas |  RSS |  |
|
