Your guide to heating your home for less

There are a number of easy steps that you can take to reduce your household energy bills, without having to break the bank.

If your radiators don’t seem to be working properly, and are cold at the top and hot at the bottom, then the chances are that you have air in your central heating system and you need to bleed some or all of your radiators. This can be done with a bleeding key, available very cheaply in most hardware stores, which needs to be pushed into the appropriate valve on a radiator in order to let the air out.


Before you do this, you should put on overalls and lay down old newspaper around the radiator, as rusty water from the heating system can tend to spurt out in the process. Make sure that your heating is off when you do this, or else you may be scalded.

The simplest way of bringing down your central heating bill is to reduce the temperature in each room by a barely noticeable one degree centigrade by adjusting your thermostat. Although you might not think that this would save you that much money, in reality this action alone can bring down your heating bills by up to 10%.

The majority of radiators built within the last ten to fifteen years are fitted with a little device known as a TRV, or Thermostatic Radiator Valve. This device allows you to set different temperatures for different rooms, typically up to a maximum value of 22 degrees Celsius. It keeps the temperature of the room constant, and conserves energy by measuring the room temperature and switching the radiator on or off depending on whether the desired temperature has been reached.

In order to have the TRV function correctly, it is vital that it is not obscured by curtains or furniture, so that it can read the room temperature accurately, ensuring that it is able to shut the radiator down when the temperature in the room has met the preset value.

Pressurised, or unvented tanks are a great way of storing your domestic hot water, as they bypass the common problem of low water pressure in the shower and the hot taps. With this central heating system, there is also no need to have any extra tanks in the loft, thus freeing up valuable space for storage or even an extra bedroom. They achieve this by using a set of check and pressure control valves as protection against a build up of pressure. Due to this, they require annual check ups to ensure that these devices are working properly and that there is no danger of excess pressure building up inside the cylinder.

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