Environmental

Cut your energy bill

Find the appliances that actually cost money, work out whether a solar array would cover them, and stop paying to fight your own thermostat.

4 steps 6 min read 3 tools chained Home

Rank appliances by what they really use

Intuition is bad at this. A 1,000 W microwave used for fifteen minutes a day costs far less than a 55 W fridge that never switches off — because energy is power multiplied by hours, and the fridge has all of them.

Fridge, all year482 kWh
At 28p/kWh£135
Microwave, 15 min/dayfar less
Rule of thumbWatts matter less than watt-hours. Always multiply by the hours before deciding what to unplug.

See what a roof could actually make

A 4 kWp array is a typical domestic size. What it yields depends on where you are, which way the roof faces and how steep it is — the tool carries real irradiance data per city rather than a single national average.

System4 kWp
London, south, 35°≈3,800 kWh/yr
At 28p≈£1064/yr
Rule of thumbRoughly 950 kWh per kWp per year is a fair UK planning figure; sunnier latitudes run 1,300–1,700.

Stop heating and cooling at the same time

A lot of energy goes into fighting humidity rather than temperature. If the air is damp, drying it makes a room feel cooler at the same thermostat setting — and costs less than dropping the setting.

Air24 °C
Humidity70%
Drier air at same tempfeels cooler
Rule of thumbEvery 1 °C you can avoid on the thermostat is worth roughly 5–10% of the heating or cooling energy for that space.

Check the payback honestly

Put the install cost and your real tariff into the solar tool and read the payback rather than the brochure number. Then compare it against simply using less — which has an install cost of zero.

Install£8,000
Annual saving≈£1064
Simple payback≈7.5 years
Rule of thumbEfficiency first, generation second. The cheapest kilowatt-hour is the one you never needed.

Measure, then generate

The chain runs in the right order deliberately: find the real consumers, cut what you can for free, and only then size generation against what is left. Put your own tariff in — it changes every number on the page.

Reference only. Stories chain real tools — the numbers shown are worked examples, so check them against your own figures before relying on them.