Electricity; the cost of cold.

I was lying in bed, this morning, wondering about the electricity hike.  I’d gone to sleep with my electric blanket on, again.  HRT has happily rebalanced me to my natural state – completely freezing, so it wasn’t a problem.  Sometimes I crawl into my electric blanket during the day, just to warm up, like a reptile under a sun lamp. Occasionally, I even get on a sun bed, not for the tan, but warm my bones – otherwise, they chill me from the inside.   The problemo is, I’m not sure how much my electric blanket costs and I’ve noticed everyone is posting about their electric bills going up to £50k a quarter.  I’m not sure I can live without it, so I consulted t’internet.  The Sun, who are notoriously reliable about everything, came up with an article about this very thing.  The Sun says;

“ A 100W electric blanket run for seven hours a week would use 0.7kWh….. Based on this, it costs 19.6p to run a 100W electric blanket for one hour… from the April 1^st price increase.”

I paused to fully take this in, The Sun think people have it on for 7 hours a week?  Shows how completely out of touch they are.  An obvious typo, they clearly meant to say, 7 hours a night.  My brain said that’s £1.60 a night, then it reminded me to add in my daughter’s electric blanket.  When she got it, she turned it on, and she kept it that way, day and night.  (£3.20 a day).   Also, I’ll often get up in the morning to find some’s been down in the night and turned every light in the house on, claiming, “I was scared”.  Well, from now on I’m going scarier than any lurking monsters or murders.  Those blankies alone, with our current (excessive) use, are costing a fat £145 a month now.  (Wtaf?)  I went into my daughter’s room while researching this fascinating article and removed it from her bed.  I unplugged mine, but left it in situ – just in case.

I also have the central heating it on as much as I like, without some boiling hot bloke, constantly complaining and resetting my thermostat to “Artic”.  This is one of the (many) benefits of divorce. I like to keep it on 24 hours a day, so I’ll know if it breaks down and needs fixing.  If I get cold, I also light the wood burner.  

 A couple of (former) male friends messed with my heating at a party here once.  A wet June evening some years ago, I had it set to “Cote D’Azure”, summer mode.  These two loonies happily informed me that they’d turned my thermostat down, pleased as punch, with themselves.  Now, I expect a bit of a mess at an event, but there’s no need to completely ruin my home. I threw them out immediately.  I survive the rest of summer, wrapped up in my blanket (I had to buy a really long extension cable so I could get around the house).  Eventually, I managed to get the thermostat to “Seychelles”, before the Autumn hit.

The truth of the matter is that I have far worse electric problems that those.  Some idiot (cough, me) fitted Mum’s annex with electric heating.  A 3kw towel rail  and a 3kw radiator.  As of last week, they’re going to cost £10 a day to run, that’s £300-ish a month, with no leap year let-up till 2024.  (To be fair, she turns her heaters off in summer, thus saving 4 or 5 days). She’s in great health and cooks for herself and has her own hob, fridge, TV,  fan, 10 energy saving spotlights and a bedside lamp.  Which in a way makes it harder.  I’ve added up her total wattage and decided there’s a nice old peoples’ home, a few doors away, the electric is all-inclusive, I checked.  I haven’t actually told her yet, but she’s moving in next week.  The nice thing is, she’ll be able to just see the roof of our house, from her little room. It’ll be really comforting for her, to know we’re close by.

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