There are a thousand ways to save energy by insulating your home, and a thousand places to find advice on how to do it: there are many excellent insulating and draught-excluding products out there, and all of their manufacturers are all over YouTube telling you what to install and how to install it. Stopping draughts works. Adding insulation works. Doing it will save you money, quite quickly, and reduce your carbon emissions, quite significantly.

Some other effective methods of reducing energy, however, require nothing more than modest behavioural changes. You won’t find so many manufacturers or government websites offering you advice on that, unfortunately – perhaps because no one likes to be hectored…. But you’re here to save energy, right? So here goes.

The biggest energy cost, typically, is heating the home, and so the biggest energy saving you can make is to heat it less. Obviously. The simplest way to achieve that is to just turn the thermostat down by half or one degree. Most of us will not notice the difference – except in the bill at the end of the month or quarter. If we do notice the change, it’s not for long. Our bodies evolved to be adaptable to all kinds of climates. A degree here or there is nothing. We quickly adjust to the ‘new normal’.

Part of adjusting to the new normality is a matter of wearing more clothes. Our ancestors, even our recent ancestors within living memory, wore an astonishing weight of fabric – literally kilos of underclothes and shirts and waistcoats and jumpers, all of which helped them stay comfortable in much cooler homes than we are used to nowadays. A useful guideline is that you should feel right taking your coat off when you come in, but if you feel the need to shed shirts and jumpers too then your home is probably hotter than it needs to be – unless you have particular medical needs. It makes sense to wear a T-shirt indoors in summer. In winter, it makes sense to be dressed for the weather indoors as well as out.

Our grandparents also kept warm by keeping busy. Figures show how screen-time has gone up and up, over a couple of generations. And the thing about screen-time is that it is typically almost completely static. Is it any wonder we feel cold on the sofa, watching telly in the evening, and feel the need to whack the heating up? Keep a big cosy blanket over the back of the settee instead. Or make a hot water bottle; is there anything more comforting?

Or just do something more active. Because it’s not just TVs and screens. Every single labour-saving device you own is making you colder – because labour requires energy, and spending energy makes you warm. A robot vacuum cleaner means we never have to push a broom. A vacuum cleaner, going a bit further back in time, means we never have to give a rug a stiff beating or a floor a good brush. All this heats us up.

Even small things can have a surprisingly large effect. Have you ever ground coffee by hand? It really warms you up – a lot more, certainly, than spooning in the instant or popping in a (vastly expensive) coffee pod. As for making bread – if you’re kneading it right, you’ll work up an actual sweat. Which is not something you can say of removing a slice from a packet.  

The warmth-creation of physical activity is especially true of garden chores. Using a leaf-blower in autumn can be a freezing-cold thing to do (if fun, admittedly); try it with a rake and you’ll soon feel hot – and virtuous, and fit. Wielding manual shears is warm work; using a trimmer or strimmer is chilly. The heat you generate gardening without power tools lasts when you come inside. Or think about the effort involved in switching on the central heating compared to what’s needed to get up, go outside, split logs and fetch them inside to feed a traditional fire. As the old saying goes, a wood-fire warms you twice: once when you chop the wood, once when you burn it.

If you can’t stay warm by keeping active, do the other thing our ancestors did. They went to bed. Many of us turn the heating off when we go to bed but a basic programmable thermostat enables you to set it to go off an hour beforehand. Going to bed when it’s cold and you can get all cosy under the covers is far more satisfying than when it’s hot in the bedroom. It actually helps you get to sleep, too. Recent research has shown that getting into a cooler bed can help us feel sleepy, as our body diverts blood to the skin and away from the core.

Another effective and inexpensive technology is the thermostatic radiator valve. You can fit them for a very modest outlay. The thing to remember is not to fit one in the room where your thermostat lives (then they compete with each other, and confuse everything), and that the numbers on a ‘TRV’ do not refer to turning the radiator ‘up’ or ‘down’. They set the temperature at which the radiator comes on or stays off. (Really, they should have dials marked in degrees, not numbers.) The clues is in the name: they’re a valve, meaning an off/on switch, with a thermostat, which is like a thermometer.

But if you want to use technology, then Zoned central heating – or multi-zoned or smart heating, as it’s often called – is the gold-standard. So gold, in fact, that it’s extraordinary that it isn’t the standard. Why are any of us heating empty rooms? The newest, smartest home systems incorporate basic forms of artificial intelligence. They can observe what you do and when you go, work out the patterns in your lifestyle and habits, and adjust the heating (and lighting) to suit. (You just have to not mind that the company that licences the little electronic device in your ‘smart home’ is triangulating the data it produces with all the data you’re also giving away via your phone, credit card and internet history.)

What the smartest systems do, in short, is learn from your behaviour. But all of us can do that for ourselves – and save a lot of money and a tiny bit of planet in the process.

If you are looking for help with any electrical issues, you may find some of these services useful: