“We made sure we were all in one place so there was only one LED light on,” says Lisa, who lives in Bedfordshire with her family.
“We turned off everything at the sockets.”
Lisa was one of hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the program on Monday to ease the pressure on electricity supplies.
As a reward, she will receive a bonus of around £10 from her electricity provider and will join again on Tuesday.
The National Grid pays people to reduce their electricity consumption at peak times to try to reduce demand.
Cold, calm weather means less electricity is generated from wind power, and when people get home from work and kids get home from school, the heater, stove and kettle are running and the demand for electricity increases.
That’s why National Grid, through electric utilities, rewards people like Lisa who manage to reduce their consumption on days when the pressure on the system is highest. On Monday it worked properly for the first time after a series of days of testing. The regulation runs again on Tuesday between 4:30 p.m. and 6:00 p.m.
National Grid said when the scheme was launched that households could save up to £100 in total by running the scheme for 12 days over the winter. But many people won’t be able to reach the level of savings to earn that much.
The program rewards you based on how much you reduce compared to your typical usage. Households that typically use very little electricity have fewer opportunities to save and earn large bonuses.
Lisa and her family are already very careful with their energy consumption.
But on Monday they still managed to save about 3kWh compared to a normal day, she thinks. You’ll find out what her bonus will be in a few days, but if she’s right you’ll be paid around £10.
To make the savings, they turned off the dehumidifier, the television, and the heat pump, which uses electricity to heat their home. The laptops were fully charged in advance so their sons could do their homework and they waited until the 6pm savings window was over to prepare dinner.
And far from being a difficult exercise, Lisa says it felt good even for her two teenage sons.
“They’re both concerned about climate change — the news explained that if people don’t cut back, the coal plants could come online,” she said. “So they were really ready for that.”
Steve at Horsham did even more. He has £12 in points in his account to deduct or cash out on his energy bill. He and Lisa are both with Octopus, which offers the program to all of its customers, and says 400,000 people chose to participate as of Monday.
“We read our books for an hour instead of cooking dinner,” says Steve.
But by far the biggest saver was turning off the electric radiators that heat his apartment.
“We weren’t really cold because we had them on, then turned them off at 5 a.m. and then put them back on around six-thirty,” he says.
On Tuesday, Octopus are offering an even higher reward rate of £4 per unit of energy saved, up from the £3.37 they offered on Monday.
But even at these prices, some people won’t get rewards in the region of £10-12. Those who normally consume very little electricity at peak times have less scope for saving.
Comments on social media suggest that some people are disappointed with the amount they have made during the 10 days of testing that have been conducted over the past few months to set up the program. However, the reward per unit of energy this week is higher than in the trials.
National Grid said it paid a total of £850,000 to utilities on Monday to run the scheme. On Tuesday, they expect to spend around £2.1million.
Suppliers are paid between £3 and £6 per unit of energy saved, but can choose how much of this they want to pass on to their customers.
Some washing programs use more energy, kettles and TVs come in different sizes so you’ll have to check your own machine to see how much it uses. But the Energy Savings Trust provides approximate figures for how many units of energy, measured in kilowatt hours (kWh), it takes to run a typical model.
- A load of laundry in the washing machine 0.5 kWh
- A load in the tumble dryer 3kWh
- One rinse cycle 0.9 kWh
- Boiling a full kettle 0.2 kWh
- A 4 watt LED light bulb for one hour approximately 0.004 kWh.
For Alex Alliston in Gloucestershire, however, it’s not about the money.
The semi-retired renewable energy engineer says the program is about proving people are willing to change their behavior.
“If we can get consumers to curb their consumption [at peak times] we will burn less of the expensive gas. It’s not as dirty as coal, but we should make our system greener,” he says.
On Monday he cooked a fish pie and turned off the oven at 5 p.m. Then it completely disconnected from the power grid. He has a battery that can power lights and other low-power devices around his house.
He expects there will be a lot more demand management in the future and believes everyone will benefit from it.
However, currently only around 14 million homes, less than half of all homes in England, Scotland and Wales, have a smart meter installed, a requirement for participation.
And currently, some providers are only inviting a subset of their customers to participate.
However, if you have not been invited by your supplier or your supplier has not signed up for the system, Loop, a company registered with the National Grid system, can offer you the service.
The company offers people a free app that connects to their smart meter to help them understand electricity use and find ways to use less.
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