What you should know about me, is that I don’t really follow the news. So the few pieces of news that do reach me gotta have to be the big ones, or at least the ones people talk the most about. The huge increase in electricity prices here in Norway is one of them, and not because I received an excruciatingly expensive bill. Until last week I had absolutely no overview of what I was paying for. So here comes my first tip to you: get a grip.
1 – Knowledge is power: find out what you pay for
The reason for my total cluelessness is that I live in a borettslag, which is a sort of apartment complex. Every month we pay a certain amount of money to our property management company that covers insurance, internet, maintenance and of course electricity. Worse than that, everybody in the building pays the same amount, but twice a year, somebody from “the board” reads the electricity meters of each apartment, and those who consumed more than what they paid for get a nice little extra invoice.
For the past five years, I’ve been lucky – or sparse enough – that I got some money back on the electricity. So I never questioned whether the contract we had was good or not. Until the property management company increased the monthly fee to keep up with the increased electricity prices. Turns out we had been paying way more than we should have.
2 – Cancel what you don’t need
Because we are a complex building (Norwegian readers, do you have a better translation for Borettslag?), we are considered a company and not a bunch of private persons sharing walls and a stair. In the five years I’ve lived here, the contract has been unchanged and we’ve been paying for some sort of “green fee”, which is usually “for big companies who want to appear as environmentally friendly”, according to another electricity company I contacted.
If you’re in the same living configuration, ask whoever would have access to your building’s electricity contract, for example, “the board”. In my case, I had to send an email directly to our electricity provider. It just takes an email.
If you’re a so-called private person and pay your electricity bills directly, go through them. Do you have extra services you’re charged for, without knowing what they are? Find out, and cancel them if you don’t use them.
3 – Find a better contract elsewhere and/or negotiate with your current providers
Again, knowledge is power. It helps to know what you have, and what you can potentially get. After I received the email with the details of our contract, I joined a Facebook group and asked some very knowledgeable people if they had any input on a better electricity provider for our complex building. Our contract was actually so bad that we could have switched to any one of those for the better.
But we also let our current provider that we were looking elsewhere and asked if they could give us a better offer. The answer was “because you’ve been our customer for so long” (or because we have taken so much of your money), BAM, here is a much much better contract.
4 – Plan your consumption and consider changing your habits
If you already have the best contract you can get, you can still limit how much you pay every month, by using the appliances when the electricity is the cheapest. This tip only works if you have a “spot price contract” (see tip 1, and know what you pay for).
Spot prices
A spot price is the price your provider buys the electricity for from the market. Prices change throughout the day, depending on demand and supply. Most likely, your provider sells it forward to you for a slightly higher price (or much higher in my case), but as long as you have a transparent spot price agreement, you can still find out when the best moment to run your dishwasher is.
Use an app
So far I’ve tested two apps:
- Min strøm, for both Denmark, Sweden, and Norway
- Nordpool, which is the company that runs the leading power market in Europe. In addition to the countries above, it includes the United Kingdom, Finland, and the Baltic States.
I’m sure you can easily find an app or a website with spot prices in your country. The way these two apps work is that you can check spot prices hour by hour for the current day, and at some point during the day, the app is updated with prices for the next day.
A few takeaways
Here are a few takeaways, after a couple of weeks of using them:
- Spot prices are lower during the night/early hours of the morning, but after a few tries, I decided I value my sleep too much to run the washing machine then. The same applies to the dishwasher. But if your bedroom is far away from the bathroom or kitchen then go for it. If you cannot set your appliance to start a few hours later, then you should consider getting a clock-operated switch timer (Norwegian reader, look up “koblingsur”).
Instead of doing laundry during the night, I check spot prices for the current and next day and decide when to run the machine accordingly. If anything, it has made me more structured, and postpone this kind of thing less often.
- The demand is typically higher in the morning while people get ready for work and around dinner time. I’m not saying you should change your eating habits, but I personally started to shower more often in the evening, which is something I actually used to do before.
- Monday this week prices were particularly high, and I was glad this was my office day (I work from home the rest of the week). I’m not at liberty to choose when I go, but if you do and you can decide last minute, go whenever the electricity is expensive. In other words, be creative. Don’t be a prisoner of the app, hour by hour, just use it to make smart choices.
5 – Lower your consumption
Now that we’ve gone through everything you can do to pay less without changing your habits too much, let’s take a look at how you can save by consuming less; which is, by the way, the environmentally friendly thing to do.
According to Direct Energy, the two categories that use the most energy in our homes are heating & cooling (46 %) and water heating (14 %). So if you’re not willing to do much about this, you could then just focus on one or both categories.
- Lowering your heaters by one or two degrees can make a big difference. I’d even say that if you’re wearing T-shirts throughout the winter (I’m talking actual winter, not tropical 20-degree winter), then you can potentially save a lot by adding on layers. Something I’ve learned here is that wool is golden (Ull er gull).
But don’t go all too crazy about putting on wool and lowering the temperature to a minimum! Especially if you’re over 65 years old. In this Norwegian article, a professor from the University of Oslo explained that when you breathe in cold air, you get less blood flow in your nose, and thus fewer immune cells that can fight infections.
The article also mentions a study where researchers compared indoor temperatures in elderly’s homes in Norway and Ireland. Norwegian bathrooms and living rooms are generally higher than the Irish’s, something the team correlated to less “excess winter death”. The study is called “Annual variations in indoor climate in the homes of elderly persons living in Dublin, Ireland and Tromsø, Norway” and you can find it here. - When it comes to water, you can keep it at your usual temperature (when showering for example) but try instead to reduce the amount of water being used, and consequently being heated. For around 15 € I replaced my regular shower head with one that reduces the use to 9 liters per minute maximum. The beauty of it is that the pressure feels so high that you’re never going to use it at its maximum capacity, hence lots of water saved. I also installed a similar device on the kitchen tap.
Sometimes it’s also just as simple (or as difficult) as getting good habits: only boil what you need in the water boiler, use a lid when you boil something on the stove, close the door in between rooms with different temperatures, and so on.
Bonus tip: When it’s really critical
I randomly saw this one on Facebook and I want to share it in case some of you are in a really critical situation: if it’s really cold in your bedroom, possibly because you have no electricity at all, you can set up a tent on your bed (or wherever practical). Being in a smaller space, you’ll keep the warmth more easily.
I hope any of this helps!
