It’s been a particularly good Spring, hasn’t it? Lots and lots of sunshine, warm daytime temperatures, and almost no rain. It’s almost like the lovely Spring that we had in 2020, but without the lockdown restrictions. As such, we’ve been able to enjoy it a bit more.
As solar panel owners, it’s been particularly welcome. In March, our solar panel system saved us £50 by not needing to import energy from the grid, and we exported another £25 of excess electricity. And this month, despite us not being halfway through yet, we’ve already exported £25 of electricity. Overall, we’ve certainly exported far more than we’ve used from the grid. However, we’re having some issues with our smart electric meter not reporting usage, and so I’m not able to properly quantify this yet.
Although it’s been cold at nights, we’re still using less gas and electric than we would typically use at this time of year thanks to the nice weather. It’s been warmer during the day, and we’ve been able to dry more laundry outside too. We haven’t used our heated drying rack for a few weeks now.
Energy prices
Speaking of energy prices, I’m hoping that this will mean that Ofgem’s Energy Price Cap will go down when it changes again in July. The warmer weather should have reduced the use of gas central heating, and the increased contribution of solar energy will have reduced the amount of gas that’s burned to generate electricity. Seeing as it’s mainly wholesale gas prices that drive the price cap calculations, reduced demand for gas will hopefully see the price cap fall.
Hosepipe bans
It’s been that long since it rained that I can’t remember the last wet day that we had. Which has been good for getting out and about, but not so good for keeping the reservoirs topped up. Rain is forecast for next week, but if the general trend is for lots of hot dry days, then I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with a hosepipe ban in the summer.
If you want to plan now for a hosepipe ban and don’t already have a water butt to store excess rainwater, consider getting one from Save Water Save Money. Pop your postcode in to find out if you can get one subsidised by your water company. They’re at least £10 cheaper than elsewhere, as long as you’re prepared to wait around six weeks for delivery. We haven’t invested in one yet (we need additional work doing on our guttering) but it’s something to consider.
One thing we have bought in response to the warm weather has been a portable air conditioning unit. British homes are not typically built with air conditioning systems (and our house is around 100 years old in any case). Whilst the nights have been cold, I’m fully expecting that, if this good weather continues, there will be some hot nights on the way. A standard pedestal fan can help keep you cool by blowing away sweat, but it can’t cool the air in a room. Once it’s arrived and I’ve had time to evaluate it, I’ll do a blog post.
We’ve had our solar panels for a couple of years now, and, as a thought experiment, I’ve wondered if it would be possible to go ‘off grid‘. This would mean having no connection to the electricity and gas networks, and potentially the water network too.
Now, I’m very much aware that this is a classic example of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, and indeed, the short version of this is pretty much, ‘no’ when it comes to electricity and water. Especially if the person reading this is my wife, Christine (love you sweetheart). It is intended to be a thought experiment after all.
Getting off the gas grid
We’ll start with the easiest one – getting off the gas grid. This is actually a long-term of ours, and many homes are now getting disconnected from the gas grid.
When we bought our house, which will have been 10 years ago this summer, it was a very gas-reliant house. There were three gas fires, a gas central heating boiler and water tank, and a gas cooker. We got two of the gas fires out before we’d even moved in, and the remaining one followed when we had the very old gas boiler replaced with a more energy efficient condensing boiler in 2016. Next to go was the gas cooker, when we had the kitchen renovated in 2022, so now we only need gas for heating and hot water.
Now our boiler isn’t quite nine years old, but it’s likely to have a few years left in at least. When it’s due for replacement, our plan is to switch to an air source heat pump, which will be electrically powered. That will mean there’s no need for a gas connection to our home, and we can have it completely removed. As well as meaning that we don’t need to pay the daily gas standing charge, we’ll no longer have pipes carrying an invisible and highly flammable gas running into our home. And it’ll reduce our carbon footprint too.
Off-grid electricity
So that’s the easy one out of the way. Going off grid for electricity, however, is likely to be much harder.
We’ve made a start, at least, with our solar panels. In the summer months, with longer days and more sunlight, we generally generate enough to be self-sufficient. We also have a battery attached to the system, so the solar panels can charge the battery during the day, and then the house can run off the battery overnight.
However, at this time of year, we are very much not self-sufficient. This is especially true as I write this on a very dull Sunday afternoon, where our solar panels are contributing a mere 7 watts of power. That’s about enough to run a couple of LED light bulbs, but certainly not enough for our freezer, for example. We would therefore need other ways of generating electricity on dull days, or at night.
Ovo Energy have a useful guide here. Generally speaking, a roof-mounted turbine would be capable of generating 1-2 kW of electricity, which is less than half the peak capacity of our solar system. And that’s based on a lot of assumptions about wind speed that may or may not apply to your property.
As well as the installation cost, we would probably also need planning permission, as our house isn’t detached. We’re therefore looking at around £2000-3000, and it would probably take quite some time to recoup that investment.
Dull days with no wind
So, a solar system backed up with a wind turbine might cover our electricity needs. Unless it’s a dull day and there’s no wind.
I’m in a few Facebook groups for people who use Home Assistant and who have solar and battery systems, and quite a few other members have the Agile Octopus tariff. On this tariff, electricity prices change by the half hour, based on wholesale prices. If it’s forecast to be a particularly sunny and windy day, electricity prices can be very low. Indeed, they occasionally go negative – in other words, Octopus will actually pay you to take electricity out of the grid, rather than the other way round. It’s great for people who have battery systems that can charge from the grid, or who can plan their days to use more electricity at the times when it’s cheap.
Though we are Octopus Energy customers, we’re not on Agile Octopus, because prices can also shoot up on dull days with no wind. Our fixed tariff means we pay 21.10p/kWh, regardless of the weather, but on Agile Octopus, the electricity unit price can go up as high as £1 per kWh. And if you haven’t been able to charge up your home battery by then, it could get very costly.
As an aside, if you’re not already an Octopus Energy customer, here’s my referral link. You get £50 off your bill if you join, and their customer service is better than any other energy company that we’ve been with so far. There’s also an unofficial Home Assistant integration that uses their API.
Therefore, if we were to disconnect from the grid, we would need a third source of electricity. This is where it gets a bit more tricky. The options I have looked up so far include:
A wood burning stove, with a thermoelectric generator. However, in my research, I’ve yet to find anywhere in the UK that would sell such a system. And those that I have seen for home use would only be able to generate a few watts – not even enough for our house’s ‘base load’ (fridge, freezer, devices on standby etc). We have a chimney that we could use, but we would also need filters to stop particulate matter getting into the air.
Some form of hydro generation using water collected from rainfall on our roof. This would only really work when it rains; although we live in the Pennines where it rains quite a bit, I doubt this would power much more than a couple of light bulbs.
Therefore, we would probably have to fall back on a diesel generator, which would be noisy, smelly, and not good for local air quality or the environment.
No Smart Export Guarantee
The other benefit to being on the electricity grid is that you can be paid back for any excess electricity that you export. Even though it’s January, we’ve exported around £1 of electricity this month, and that’s only after our battery has been fully charged. In June last year, we were paid £46 for the electricity we exported, against £36 for the grid energy that we used. So that was a net payment to us that month. Indeed, over the whole of 2024, we were paid £227 for the excess electricity that we exported.
If we’re not on the grid, then we can’t export. So if our battery is full, that electricity is essentially being wasted. Of course, if I was serious about going off-grid, then I would probably invest in another battery to prevent this from happening, but then that’s another expense.
What about water?
Going off the water grid would be the most difficult. Although ironically, we’ve been inadvertently off the water grid four times so far this month, due to supply issues. I have an active complaint with Yorkshire Water about that, but let’s imagine that I want to willingly disconnect from the water grid for a moment.
Clearly, we would need some other way of getting clean water into the house. Rainwater is the most obvious, but we would then need somewhere to store it. In 2023, I read The Climate Change Garden(sponsored link) by Sally Morgan and Kim Stoddart, and the book shows you how you can store water in tanks underneath your garden to cope with water shortages. During the 2022 heatwave, we had a hosepipe ban for several months, and so I’m considering whether to get a water butt to store rain water for use in the garden. You may be eligible for a subsidised water butt from Save Water Save Money – you’ll need to pop in your postcode to see if your water company participates.
But even a butt, or huge tanks under our lawn, are unlikely to be sufficient. We would ideally need to have access to a constant flow of running water, such as a stream. And we would need the means to filter the water so that it’s fit for drinking.
And what about sewage? We don’t have a particularly big garden and so we probably wouldn’t have room for a septic tank, or any other means of storing and/or treating waste.
A case study: Gibson Mill
Up above Hebden Bridge is Hardcastle Crags, a National Trust property which is home to Gibson Mill. The Mill is off-grid, because of its remote location – it’s about a mile away from the nearest electricity cables, for example. So, electricity is instead generated on site, using solar panels and a hydro-electric generator. Mills were typically built next to watercourses and Gibson Mill is no exception, being served by Hebden Beck. Whilst this would have driven a waterwheel in years gone by, nowadays it drives a turbine to produce electricity. The solar panels have recently been replaced with newer, more efficient models, and there are huge batteries to store energy.
We last went back in 2023, and despite having more than one way of generating electricity on site, there was still a diesel generator at the back that was needed to top-up the electricity supply. Even then, they were unable to serve hot food in the café as a result of not having sufficient power.
Gibson Mill also has no connection to the sewerage system, so its toilets are composting toilets. Below the toilets are huge vats filled with worms, who digest our waste for us. It’s feasible at this scale because it’s a tourist attraction, and the alternative of laying pipes would be more expensive.
Conclusion – staying mostly on-grid
So, in summary: going totally off-grid would be difficult, although coming off the gas grid is achievable and something that we want to do eventually. We don’t live in a very remote area, and so going off-grid with electricity and/or water wouldn’t really make sense. Even if we could find the means to generate our own electricity, the upfront costs of installing the required equipment would probably outweigh the potential savings.
Today, I’m going to talk to you about washing machines. We bought a new one last month, and it is so much better than our old one in several ways.
The new washing machine is this Bosch model, which is normally £399 from John Lewis. We actually paid much less, by combining loads of gift vouches from the wedding and a cashback offer that was on at the time. This is now installed in our new house.
Our old washing machine is the one in our flat. It’s a Hotpoint washer-dryer, so it will wash and tumble-dry our clothes in one process. It’s probably around 10-15 years old as we assume that it was installed when the building was converted from a mill into flats.
For a start, washer-dryers are never as good as stand-alone washing machines and tumble dryers. Indeed, the dryer part of our old Hotpoint machine is pretty rubbish – if you’re lucky, it’ll get a half load mostly dry in around two and a half hours after the wash cycle is completed. Bigger loads will come out wet.
But it’s also not that great at washing either. It’s okay, but takes its time, and the drum can only take 6 kilograms of washing – about 13 pounds in old money.
The new Bosch machine has a much bigger drum that can take 8 kilograms (17.6 lb), so we can wash a third more clothes in each cycle. It’s significantly quieter, and barely makes any noise apart from during the spin cycle, which is still comparatively quiet. This is good for us as the washing machine is in the kitchen, which is directly below the room that will become the baby’s room when it’s born.
As well as being a good price, we also chose the Bosch model because of its energy and water efficiency. It’s rated A+++ for energy usage, which is the highest possible rating, and it required the least amount of water. Indeed, it looks like it uses less water than our current machine despite being able to handle bigger loads.
Despite using less water and electricity, the Bosch machine still manages to be quicker than the old Hotpoint machine – even when you enable its energy efficient mode. So not only does it wash clothes more quickly, it costs less money to do so. And it has a countdown timer telling you how long it has left. Timers these tend to be standard on new machines nowadays but this is the first time I have owned one with a timer, and it’s really useful.
We chose to get a water meter fitted to the house, and so conserving water will save us money in the long term, as will the reduced electricity costs. Furthermore, as we’ve opted not to buy a tumble dryer, this will save us more money on electricity bills in future. The house has a drying rack in the kitchen and space outside for washing lines, which we don’t have in the flat. And with a little one on the way, we’re likely to be using the washing machine far more often than now.
If you have an old washing machine, I would advise you to consider a newer model. The improvements in energy and water efficiency may well save you money in the long term and make up for the cost of buying a new machine. We’re really pleased with ours.
