I know it’s winter and power bills go up in winter but given that winter is technically only a few weeks old I was quite horrified at my power bill this month (and very scared for next month’s one). To top it all off I saw this article in the paper this morning about a potential increase in the cost of power for some regions.

Needless to say, I’m going to be implementing a few power saving measures in our household this month! So I’ve let my fingers do the walking and done a bit of googling and these are the top 5 things that I’ve found that I’m going to do this month to try and bring the power bill down:

• Wash my clothes on a cooler wash cycle
• Turn down the temperature on the heat pump and be a bit more conscious of how often we use it and for how long for.
• Check which light bulbs are energy efficient and which aren’t (embarrassingly I have no idea) and then aim to replace those light bulbs which aren’t energy efficient with more efficient ones over the next few months (the light bulbs aren’t always cheap so I might need to spread the cost over a few months).
• Turn off rarely used appliances at the wall
• Empty and turn off the spa pool

Not that it will save me money but I’m also going to set up a smooth pay / even pay payment with my energy provider so that the bills don’t come such a shock to the budget each month.

There are loads of other ideas on the energywise website and you can check if you’re with the cheapest power company on the powerswitch website. (I checked ours and we're on the cheapest plan for us).

Your mission (should you choose to accept it) – what one thing are you going to do this month to bring down the dreaded winter power bill?

I’ll report back next month to let you know how I got on.