From the moment you haul yourself out of bed in the morning and step bleary-eyed into the electric shower, to that second when you turn off the lights and shut off your kindle, your iPad, your phone or maybe even your actual book later tonight, you have been spending money – and spending it in a way that is almost invisible.
The bad news is that you’ve been spending that money faster than ever in recent days as the price of energy has soared due in no small part to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
When we part with most of our cash, it is easy to identify where it goes. If you walk into a shop, all the products are clearly priced, menus tell how much the food costs in restaurants, and we routinely get bills from our broadband and mobile phone providers outlining what we are paying and why. Whether we bother to look at those bills is an entirely different matter.
The utility companies send out bills, of course, but they are as vague as they are incomprehensible. With energy prices rising at a shocking rate – some people will see prices jump by more than €1,000 over the next 12 months – now is as good a time as any to look closely at exactly where our energy money is going and how we might hang on to some of it.*
But where do we start? At the beginning of the day obviously.
Shower
It's 7am and the phone alarm wakes you up. You stumble into the electric shower. Spending five minutes under the stream of hot water costs around 22 cent based on a typical standard rate of electricity.
Leaving all your devices on standby overnight will cost around 20 per cent of the cost of actually using them
Hair
Once the shower is done you might find yourself in the fortunate position of needing a hair dryer for 10 minutes, in which case you will spend another 10 cent on making yourself dry and presentable.
Breakfast
And now it is time for breakfast. You boil the kettle for a pot of tea, which adds another 4 cent to the running total. If you decide to have coffee instead, you can probably make a decent cup for no more than a cent using your Nespresso machine.
Your morning toast costs another 2 cent and, because you have time on your hands, you have porridge. You don’t want to bother with the pot so you microwave your Progress Oatlets at a cost of 2 cent.
Lights
You obviously won't want to have your breakfast in the dark so will need at least some lights on. In fact, you will probably need lights on for a decent chunk of the day and night – at least until the clocks go forward next week. Keeping a lightbulb illuminated for one hour will cost around 1 cent and if you have five of them on for 10 hours over the course of the day, that will set you back 50 cent.
Laundry and dishes
With your morning repast done, you load the dishwasher and set it off on a two hour cycle. That's another 98 cent spent. Today is laundry day – although if you have children you might find that every day is laundry day. Running the washing machine on a two hour cycle will cost you another 98 cent.
You will have to dry the clothes and you can't hang them out because it is Ireland and it is March and it will rain so – almost as if you were made of money – you deploy the tumble dryer. If your clothes take just two hours to dry then you are looking at another €2.22 down the drain – literally.
Work
And so to work. Spend eight hours working on a desktop computer will set you back 48 cent, although if you switch to a laptop and leave it plugged in for much of the day the cost falls to 18 cent.
Hot water
It is nearly 11am, so you make more tea at a cost of another 4 cent.And then, at midday, you realise one of your worst nightmares has come true. You've only gone and left the immersion on for four hours – you can't even remember why you turned the damned thing on in the first place. No matter, you have wasted the guts of €3 on heating your water tank for no good reason.
Chilling
At lunchtime you make a carbon neutral sandwich – yum – although most of the ingredients come from your fridge, which is working away 24 hours a day keeping your food chilled or frozen at a cost of around 2.5 cent an hour or 60 cent a day.
You make more tea so that’s another 4 cent gone.
Housework
At this point you might decide that the house needs a hoover – or a vacuum as the people at Dyson or Miele would rather we say. The good news is that 20 minutes of hoovering only costs 8 cent. The bad news is that you have just spent 20 minutes hoovering.
Tumble dry at your peril, never leave electrical goods on stand-by, and only turn on the immersion if you win the Lotto
Entertainment
Once your work day is done you turn on the telly or, if you can multi-task, you might have had it on all day in case you missed something exciting on Judge Judy or wanted to laugh at the dullards on The Chase.
If it stays on for six hours then it will cost you another 16 cent. Your Alexa plugged in and hanging on your every word – or spying on you for Big Tech - will cost you 2 cent a day, while charging your phone from dead to full is another 5 cent.
Dinner
And suddenly it is dinner time. Cooking a casserole or a roast in your oven for two hours will add €1.44 to your daily bill – but that has the benefit of cooking everything at the same time.
Overnight
If you are partial to an electric blanket and turn it on for two hours before you climb into a double bed then you will be snug as a bug for around 12 cent.
Leaving all your devices on standby overnight will cost around 20 per cent of the cost of actually using them, which means you may end up spending around 36 cent a day because you can’t be bothered to plug things out.
So far our running total is coming in at €11.57 – though it’s actually more like €8.57 if we assume that leaving the immersion on was a one off oversight, so we’ll exclude that from the tally. While some of the costs here will not be incurred daily – the laundry, the oven, the hoovering – others are which is why, when spread out over the course of a year, our energy bills climb so high.
Heating
Of course, with all our running around we have forgotten to actually heat our house. And that is where the big spending comes in. How much you spend on heating depends entirely on how warm you like your house to be, its size and how well insulated it is.
Allowing €1.64 to centrally heat a three bedroom house for one hour, the cost of a not unreasonable usage of six hours over the course of a day will come in at €9.84, taking the total cost of energy for our home for one day in winter to €18.41.
Were you to spend at something like that level every day, it would take your total energy cost over a full year to around €6,000.
The good news is that for much of the year, energy costs are significantly less than outlined here – the heating bill alone can fall by as much as €2,000 over the warmer months. Even so, few Irish housesholds will have change left from €3,000 over the next 12 months. And with prices likely to climb further, things may get a whole lot worse before they even start getting better.
Is there anything you can do? Wear more clothes and use less heat. Knocking 1 degree off your thermostat could reduce your heating bills by 3 to 10 per cent. Don’t heat your house if you are not in it, so turn off the heating at least 30 minutes before you plan to leave.
Don’t light rooms that you’re not in. Only run washing machines or dishwashers when they are full, tumble dry at your peril, never leave your electrical goods on standby, and only turn on the immersion if you win the Lotto. Washing clothes at 30 degrees will save money and do less damage to your clothes while the economy settings on all other appliances will do what they say and help you economise.
A smart energy meter from any of the utilities allows you to monitor usage in real time, and you should always look to switch providers annually. According to the folk at Bonkers.ie, an active switcher can save themselves around €500 a year, which will offset most, if not all, of the recent price hikes we have faced.
*Figures based on a typical standard unit rate for electricity incorporating an additional 20 per cent to reflect recent and future price increases
