Most energy advice is a list of tips. Lists are easy to read and hard to act on, because they give no sense of order, effort or return — so people do the easy items, skip the effective ones, and conclude that it did not make much difference.
What follows is a year, arranged so each step makes the next one easier and cheaper. It is deliberately paced. Nothing here requires doing everything at once, and the first three months cost almost nothing.
Month 1: measure, change nothing
The discipline that makes the rest work.
Get a local whole-house electricity feed from your meter or a clamp, and record two numbers: your standing load in the small hours, and your typical daily total.
Read your gas or heating fuel meter weekly and write it down.
Put a cheap temperature and humidity sensor in every room and leave them alone.
Find your last twelve months of bills and note the annual totals in kilowatt-hours rather than money, since prices move and consumption is what you control.
Resist changing anything this month. You are establishing what normal looks like, and without it you will never know whether anything worked.
Month 2: the free wins
Hunt the standing load. Rotate a metering plug around anything that is always on, and switch off what does not need to be. The target is a lower 3am figure by the end of the month.
Turn the boiler flow temperature down towards 55 °C, gradually. This lets a condensing boiler actually condense and costs nothing.
Enable weather compensation if your heating supports it. Frequently present and frequently disabled.
Check the thermostat position, and move it or add a remote sensor if it sits in a hallway, above a radiator or in the sun.
Bleed and balance the radiators, which is an hour with two thermometers and fixes most cold-room complaints.
Stop drying laundry indoors, and watch what happens to your humidity sensors.
Month 3: the cheap wins
Draughtproof the accidental gaps — skirtings, frames, loft hatch, unused chimney, service penetrations — and leave purpose-provided ventilation alone.
Insulate the cylinder and the first pipe runs, which is a few pounds and pays back in weeks.
Fit aerators on taps and a lower-flow shower head, since hot water is usually the second largest energy use.
Put the secondary circulation pump on a schedule, if you have one running continuously.
Replace any remaining halogen or incandescent lamps.
By the end of this month, compare your standing load and weekly heating figures against month one. There should be a visible difference, and seeing it is what sustains the rest of the year.
Months 4–5: the tariff
Now that consumption is lower and understood, make the remaining consumption cheaper.
Work out your annual kilowatt-hours for electricity and heating.
Compare tariffs on your actual usage pattern, not on a headline unit rate. A household with a large overnight load wants a different tariff from one with a flat profile.
Move flexible loads into cheap hours — dishwasher, washing machine, hot water, any charging — using existing delay-start buttons before buying anything.
If you have solar, measure your self-consumption rate, which is the figure that governs every later decision about storage.
This is the step with the largest ratio of benefit to effort in the whole year, and it involves no hardware.
Months 6–7: the loft and the summer jobs
Warm weather is the time for the work that is unpleasant in winter.
Top up loft insulation to current guidance — on raised legs if you need storage, not compressed under boards, not over pipework, and not blocking eaves ventilation.
Insulate the loft hatch.
Deal with summer overheating while you can see where the sun falls: external shading on the worst window, night purge ventilation, and blinds automated to track the sun rather than the clock.
Service the heating system before the season, and have the boiler condensate pipe insulated or re-routed if it runs outside.
Isolate and drain external taps and irrigation at the end of the season.
Months 8–9: controls, now that they will do something
Controls come here rather than at the start, because their value depends on everything above.
Zone the rooms that are heated for nobody — spare bedrooms first — with a frost minimum of 15 or 16 °C rather than off.
Add window-open detection pausing heating in that room.
Set honest schedules matching your actual week, with an easy boost.
Use presence to cancel heating when the house is unexpectedly empty, rather than to start it.
Automate hot water into cheap hours, keeping the weekly 60 °C cycle.
Add the three alerts: standing load above baseline, daily total well above normal, and expected consumption absent.
Months 10–12: the big decisions, made with data
A year in, you know your standing load, your heating demand corrected for weather, your self-consumption rate if you generate, your evening electricity use, and which rooms lose heat fastest. Now the expensive decisions can be made rather than guessed.
Heat pump? You know your heat demand and which emitters are undersized, which is what determines cost and performance.
Battery? You know your measured evening consumption and your price spread, which is what determines size and payback.
More solar? You know your self-consumption rate and your export arrangement.
Wall insulation? You know which rooms are worst, and a survey has something concrete to work with.
Appliance replacement? You know which appliance actually costs money rather than which one looks old.
Households that arrive at this point with data almost always spend less than they expected and get a better result, because they buy the right size of the right thing.
Bringing the household along
One thing that determines whether a year of this sticks: whether everyone in the house is part of it or having it done to them.
Show the number, not the lecture. A live cost figure somewhere visible does more than any amount of reminding, because it turns an abstract worry into feedback anyone can see.
Do not make anyone colder to save money. A household that is uncomfortable will override everything and resent the project. Comfort at a lower temperature comes from draughtproofing and warm surfaces, not from willpower.
Keep every manual control working. The moment someone cannot turn on a light or boost the heating, the system is the enemy.
Share the result. When the standing load drops or a month comes in lower than last year, say so. People will keep doing things that visibly work.
What we would not do
Do not start with generation or storage. Both are sized against demand, and demand is what the first nine months reduce.
Do not buy controls before fabric. A clever thermostat on a leaky house is optimising a losing position.
Do not chase standby loads for months. Find them once, fix them, move on. The heating is the bigger prize in almost every European home.
Do not trust percentage savings claims, including any you read here. They depend entirely on what you were doing before, which is why the first month is measurement.
Do not let it become a hobby that replaces action. Dashboards are enjoyable and the saving comes from the loft, the flow temperature and the tariff.
The whole year in eight lines
- Measure for a month. Change nothing.
- Free fixes: standing load, flow temperature, weather compensation, balancing.
- Cheap fixes: draughts, cylinder lagging, shower head.
- Change tariff and shift flexible loads.
- Summer: loft insulation, shading, servicing.
- Autumn: zoning, schedules, hot water automation, alerts.
- Winter: make the big decisions using your own figures.
- Compare against month one and write the number down.
Step eight is the one that matters most and gets skipped. A year of consumption compared against the year before, corrected for how cold it was, is the only honest measure of whether any of this worked.