Frugal Tips, Hints & Recipes

With the multiple "crises" (crisises?) we find ourselves facing no matter where we're based at the moment - cost of living, energy, fuel etc - I thought a gathering place of frugality might be good. So here's the spot for posting your energy and fuel saving tips and your tastiest frugal recipes.
Every hint, tip and recipe is welcome - crafting, home made gift ideas, gardening on a budget, repairing ideas, hints for saving fuel or energy, etc. Bring them here to share!

We've spent a lot of time thinking about energy savings- prices are going crazy here as well with another 15% going on gas and electricity in January. Wood pellet prices have doubled and are difficult to find. Oil rose 70% but has dropped back a little now.

First thing to establish with electrical appliances is how much are they using. We were staggered to find that the extractor fans in the kitchen use 500W on top speed and then discovered that the filter was clogged, so we were spending money extracting nothing. Our 3KW tumble dryer was scrapped years ago. We only wash clothes when we have drying weather and if we get caught out by an incorrect forecast, partially dried clothes go into the bathroom where we have a 250W dehumidifier (which also had a clogged filter). The TV uses 140W, which was much more than we thought and explains why the room temperature rises when it is on. We have energy saving bulbs in most places, but they are a bad buy for areas little used because they are expensive and don't last anywhere near as long as they claim. We bought three for the kitchen table lights only to see two fail just after a year (with a one year guarantee).

Our oil heating keeps the house at 17C, which is too cold to sit in so the one room is warmed to 19C (legal maximum here now) with a fan heater, rather than raise the temperature in the whole house. We haven't got thermostatic valves on the radiators and to retrofit them would be extremely difficult. Not possible to add more insulation than we have- 9" in the loft and double glazing on all the windows.

Everything that breaks and that can be repaired is, which includes the outside solar lights. If parts are not available they can sometimes be made. I have a sign on the garage door- 'the repair shop'.

Well done Chris. It is so easy to miss things like clogged fans. I eventually found a spring loaded backdraught shutter for my kitchen extractor fan - it fitted in the vent hose and stopped the cold air tumbling down like a waterfall!

I have oil central heating and have thermostatic radiator valves on all radiators except one - you need that or they won't work. The biggest difference to my oil consumption was fitting a WIRELESS room thermostat. It just needed some by-pass wiring in the boiler to work and it's magic!! It is set at the same temperature for every day because I'm usually at home. If I'm going to be out all day I can quickly reduce the target temperature before I leave and have it come back up to what I want 30-60 minutes before I'm due home. A day like today with a high solar gain and when I'm intending to be fairly active indoors, I can with the touch of three buttons reduce the temperature all day and then it will reset to the night tome temperature which is 16 degrees C. I had the thermostat fitted in 2015 and I'm fairly certain that the heating has only switched on once during the night, i.e. the temperature doesn't usually drop quite that low.

It has been quite cold here at night and we've had a windchill factor during the day but as long as there's some sun my solar PV panels generate electricity and the sun warms the house - I'm fortunate that half my windows face south - the other half face north but the two biggest rooms have windows both ends.

I think whatever style of house you live in the most important thing is not to let the temperature drop too far. Think of a large pot of cold water being brought to the boil - it takes huge amounts of energy. Once it si hot it takes very little to keep it just simmering and can be heated up without using much energy. Stone walled houses cna take a long time for the "fabric" to heat up, but once the walls are warmed through they act like storage heaters. We once owned a huge property which was run as a B&B. Most of it was early 16th century, one block was 1803 and the other end it was 1903 - that was the coldest part as 30 feet square with very high ceilings. We discovered quite quickly that it was best to keep the big coalfired stove in the open-plan guest lounge/dining room burning at a low setting all the time. Then when we had guests (at weekends mainly) the core of the building was warm and didn't need huge efforts to get it warm enough for the guests.

Whatever you do, if you have wet under floor heating, don't keep turning it off and on. It works on the storage heater principle and we had a tenant who caused huge problems in an old, stone built cottage because she would turn it off while at work and expect it to heat up quickly (Like radiators) when she got home. AS a result the cottage became damp (no DPC, the walls were straight on the earth). If she had kept it running at quite a low temperature it would have stayed warm and dry.

By the way, air source heat pumps don't work very well with radiators, under floor heating is best, and they don't work AT ALL with microbore central heating which rules it out for me. A friend of mine had an air source heat pump installed and six weeks later it was all ripped out and a boiler re-installed which works perfectly with their microbore central heating and radiators.

Oh, and if I sit down to read at some point in the day I put a rug over my knees! Non of the furry-purrys I have now are really lap cats. ?

If anyone would like a ghoulish idea for Halloween...
I had leftover mashed potatoes, so made Potato, Leek & onion soup. But I only had red onions. I thought it wouldn't make much difference - and taste-wise, it didn't. Soup was delicious.

However. The colour bled out of the red onions, and the normally creamy coloured Soup is a vile shade of sinus infection green!! ??

We also have a wireless thermostat Margaid. It is 'intelligent', so learns when the boiler needs to be fired before the thermostat says the temperature is too low and therefore maintains a very even temperature. Ours runs at 55C because our heat 'emitters' are convectors, not radiators. Important the temperature is low because all the main pipe work, although insulated, is in the loft, so some heat is lost and it needs to be limited.

About these air to liquid heat exchangers. The reason they don't work with radiators is because the temperature of the water flow is too low. Microbore systems have the best chance of success because the radiators are 50% over-sized to allow for the low flow rate, but it won't be enough. Heat loss is proportional to the temperature difference squared, so a gas boiler will deliver at 80C to a room of 20C and the heat output will be 60C squared, so 3600 units. But a heat exchanger will only be delivering at 50C (and at that temperature will not give the savings expected). So 50C-20C squared gives 900 units, a quarter of the required output. Net result is a choice of 4x more radiators or fit convectors, which are expensive. Putting more insulation in the house doesn't address the primary issue, hence a lot of unhappy customers. Microbore systems are excellent for condensing boilers though because it is easy, with a bit of tuning, to get the return flow temperature below 53C.

Current project. I'm reopening the fireplace in the living room, and putting a stove in there. This fireplace hasn't been used in over 20 years, and was covered over with hardboard and wallpaper. I spent about 2 hours yesterday with a hammer, hacking out the fireback. My brother, who's coming today to re-tile it, said "you'll probably find it's backfilled with sand". It was not. It was backfilled with rubble mixed with concrete. It was a hideous job, and I almost gave up halfway, but persevered! I'm looking forward to it being finished! There's a boiler stove in the kitchen, but in these uncertain times, I wanted a means of heat that isn't dependent on electricity. And also, for those days when I don't need the full heating on, but a little bit of heat in the living room in the evenings. Or when I'm out most of the day and can't light the boiler stove in time for the heat to make its way around to the living room, which is last on the loop, which can take 2 or 3 hours sometimes.

LadyA said:

With the multiple "crises" (crisises?) we find ourselves facing no matter where we're based at the moment - cost of living, energy, fuel etc - I thought a gathering place of frugality might be good. So here's the spot for posting your energy and fuel saving tips and your tastiest frugal recipes.
Every hint, tip and recipe is welcome - crafting, home made gift ideas, gardening on a budget, repairing ideas, hints for saving fuel or energy, etc. Bring them here to share!

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Not quite sure why I gravitated to this thread. Maybe my Scottish heritage is responsible.
Just to be quite clear, frugal does not mean tight. It's careful with resources. Nothing more, so no mean Scott jokes please.

I can recommend a small stove @LadyA - a Jotul 3. We had one in our rental and I was sceptical about it because it didn't have an ash pan, so I thought it would clog up. But it turned out to be so efficient the ash burned to a fine white powder which rarely needed removing. Looking at your photo and scaling the aperture on the basis of the brush, you may need to raise it and put in a concrete lintel- simple enough as I modified two in our UK place.

chrismahon said:

I can recommend a small stove @LadyA - a Jotul 3. We had one in our rental and I was sceptical about it because it didn't have an ash pan, so I thought it would clog up. But it turned out to be so efficient the ash burned to a fine white powder which rarely needed removing. Looking at your photo and scaling the aperture on the basis of the brush, you may need to raise it and put in a concrete lintel- simple enough as I modified two in our UK place.

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The stove is already sitting on my living room floor! ? The stove fitter rang me last week and said the supplier only had one left, so he grabbed it, and asked if he could drop it off, rather than carry it around in his van for two weeks!

Tiling is done! ? My brother did an excellent job! Once the stove is in, he's going to build a wooden surround for the hearth, he says.

Might I suggest that wood is better for burning in the stove than for making a surround from? Bricks make a good fire surround, as they're non-combustible...

Icemaiden said:

Might I suggest that wood is better for burning in the stove than for making a surround from? Bricks make a good fire surround, as they're non-combustible...

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Wood is what I will be burning. He's just going to put a timber edge around the tile on the hearth to (a) protect the edge from getting broken and (b) to give a more finished look to the edge, and conceal the layer of tile underneath. We're not talking firewood sized timber, but more of an edge piece. Like a narrow batten.

The finished project!
Haven't lit it, because at 7pm, even having had the front door and all the windows open all morning, it's still over 20C in the house! I'm really pleased with it, and very glad I went for a stove rather than an open fireplace.

That reminds me of a pub near the Trent & Mersey canal, where a piece of smouldering wood fell out of the stove & set the carpet on fire. At least you'd be able to take your rug outside...

Icemaiden said:

That reminds me of a pub near the Trent & Mersey canal, where a piece of smouldering wood fell out of the stove & set the carpet on fire. At least you'd be able to take your rug outside...

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That rug is one my late husband bought many years ago in Lidl or Aldi, for around €8! It's thin and the back is plastic-y looking but it comes out of the washing machine looking like new! I would dearly love some nice good rugs, but I have two cats who are pukers. ?

We used to live alongside the Trent and Mersey canal Icemaiden. Apart from the rats, mosquitoes, the smell of the rancid water and the diesel fumes from the boats, we used to be woken at dawn in Summer by boats moving through the lock to avoid the hour long queues during the day- not a nice place at all, but you wouldn't know unless you had lived there.

But it reminded me of the need to keep your South facing windows very clean outside in Winter, because any dust/ dirt at all restricts the solar gain dramatically (as does double glazing). I used to clean all the windows every week for that reason, which was a long job. Here we now have a Karcher window cleaner and all the windows open inwards, so very easy to clean- takes 5 minutes. No window sills inside the house for dust collecting ornaments and the profession of 'window cleaner' doesn't exist.

Useful tip.

People used to clean their motorbike engine parts in something, and I can't remember what. But if left too long the Aluminium just dissolved to nothing. I can't remember because I didn't ever use it.

I have a lot of enamel baking/roasting pans - I love enamel ware. But I'm also a little obsessive about getting every tiniest bit of baked on stuff or that brown discolouration from the oven off. I've found the very best thing for cleaning them is to soak in hot water with a dishwasher tablet (I don't have a dishwasher!). After a soak, they don't need any scrubbing - just a wipe.

I've remembered- the cleaning agent was Caustic Soda (Sodium Hydroxide). It's used as a drain cleaner, so it may be possible to buy it?

chrismahon said:

We used to live alongside the Trent and Mersey canal Icemaiden. Apart from the rats, mosquitoes, the smell of the rancid water and the diesel fumes from the boats, we used to be woken at dawn in Summer by boats moving through the lock to avoid the hour long queues during the day- not a nice place at all, but you wouldn't know unless you had lived there.

But it reminded me of the need to keep your South facing windows very clean outside in Winter, because any dust/ dirt at all restricts the solar gain dramatically (as does double glazing). I used to clean all the windows every week for that reason, which was a long job. Here we now have a Karcher window cleaner and all the windows open inwards, so very easy to clean- takes 5 minutes. No window sills inside the house for dust collecting ornaments and the profession of 'window cleaner' doesn't exist.

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Somewhere near Barton lock, iirc? We were moored at Barton Turns marina for a year when it first opened. You wouldn't recognise the place these days- it's huge!