With no mains gas, cooking & heating our water with oil cost us a fortune each year. We now cook & heat the water plus our kitchen with electric, not oil. It’s saving us £1,118 per year & we’ve reduced our CO2 by 6.9 tonnes. This is the story of how we did it.
Our first step to reducing our CO2 footprint in 2018 was to turn off the oil fuelled range in the kitchen (which used 2,555 litres of oil every year costing £1,354 & generated 7.5 tonnes of CO2).
In its place, we bought an electric hob & grill, a digital timer for the existing immersion heater & an electric convection heater. (We already had a slow cooker & a combi-microwave). Total new equipment cost £197.
The 3 kWh immersion is on for 1 hour each day & cooking also uses 3kWh daily. That’s 2,190 kWh in a year. The kitchen needs additional heat from October to the end of April, 210 days using 3.6kWh, totalling 756 kWh. Total kWh used = 2,946.
We have an innovative electricity tariff called Agile from Octopus Energy which varies daily. The average cost per kWh for our usage is 8p*. Annual cost for 2,946 kWh is £236. Swapping from oil to electric to cook & heat the water has given us a massive annual running cost saving of £1,118, for an up-front investment of £197.
And what about the CO2 reduction?
Although our tariff is 100% renewables, we’ve used the U.K. National Grid mix for 2019 of 215 grammes of CO2 per KWh for the actual mix of coal, gas, renewables, nuclear & imported). 2946 kWh x 215 = 634 kg CO2. Switching to electric for cooking & heating the water has reduced our annual CO2 by 6.9 tonnes.
(*Note even if we’d stayed with nPower & paid 19p per kWh the cost would have been £560 giving annual savings of £794).
