It might seem like it is not that big a thing, but actually reducing the temperature by 1 degree makes a difference to your energy consumption and bills. Using less energy for heating is an effective way of reducing your carbon dioxide emissions, especially if you burn gas or oil for your central heating.
Educational Example
We heat our homes to compensate for the heat loss to the cold outside.
The heat loss to the outside depends on how much external surface area our home has, how poor the insulation is, and what the difference in temperature is between the inside and outside.
To reduce the heat loss (and reduce how much heating we need) we can try and reduce one or all of these:
- There’s not much that can be done to reduce the external surface area.
- We can certainly make the insulation better (and we’ve discussed that earlier).
- The cheapest thing we can do is to reduce the temperature difference if it is still comfortable to do so by turning down the thermostat.
An example April day temperature trace looks like
The amount we needed to heat the inside to make it 20°C is shown here shaded orange:
But if we could instead heat the inside to 19°C we could save the green block:
This is repeated through the year. The average monthly temperatures here look something like:
The approximate average outside temperature throughout the year is 9°C
So for this climate, reducing the average inside temperature from 20 to 19 degrees actually is like reducing the temperature difference from 11 to 10 degrees. And that is worth around 10%.
10% reduction in fuel usage. 10% reduction in costs. 10% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.
For other ways to save without spending have a look here.
Living Laudato Si' 