Fuel Poverty.

This is a word that is being thrown around a LOT in the media these days.  Apparently, the definition of “being in fuel poverty” means spending more than 10% of your disposable income on fuel and energy.

 Whilst looking at yet another article about how bad it was, and how many households are in fuel poverty, it suddenly struck me that what we spend on fuel is *vastly* subjective.  I run a holiday cottage, and so I have the opportunity to view a lot of different people’s views on fuel and how they treat energy.

First up is my personal view.  As a bit of a green hippy tree-hugger, I don’t like turning on the central heating much.  We live in a rural area and don’t have mains gas, so our central heating is oil-fired, and costs a *fortune* to run with heating oil currently running at 52p a litre (it was 13p when we moved in).  We have a woodburner in the living room which I fire up in cases of chilliness in the evenings, and if we need hot water I tend to switch the immersion heater on by hand for the amount of time needed (bath = 30 minutes, washing up = 5 minutes etc.).  Consequently, our fuel bills are fairly manageable, and I get to feel virtuous.  It’s a win-win scenario.

So – people who stay at the cottage.  Wow.  It’s a real eye-opener.  It varies from people with attitudes like me to one couple who woke me up at 3.30am to say that they couldn’t get the central heating boiler to turn on.  My initial responses (in order) were:

1.  It’s 3.30am.  Why did you wake me up?
2.  It’s 3.30am.  Why do you need the heating on?  Shouldn’t you be under a duvet about now?
3.  The oil tank is apparently empty.  There was enough for a week.  You’ve been in for 12 hours.  What’s happened here, then?

Turned out that what they’d done was to get in, closed the door behind them, locate the thermostat and set it to 38 degrees centigrade.  Then they set all the overrides on the boiler so that it fired constantly.  When they got hot, they opened a window.  They burned £50 of fuel in 12 hours this way.  I was a bit cross, to put it mildly.

So it strikes me that if you use energy like our profligate guests, then it is quite easy to get into fuel poverty.  If you are slightly more sensible and do things like … oooh… putting on a woolly jumper and cuddling under a blanket on the sofa in the evening, then it is slightly easier to economise.

On a similar note, I was very amused to read a comment on a “fuel poverty” article by someone pointing out that insulation didn’t work.  He’d got loft insulation, wall insulation and double glazed windows, but his house cost the same amount to heat!  I did wonder if he’d tried actually turned the thermostat down.  Insulation makes it easier to bear lower temperatures – it doesn’t turn the boiler off for you!