Trying to reduce your utilities as a student can be a pain, as there are many people sharing the cost, the devices, the facilities and the space. It’s important to try and understand what your own usage is and what the usage of your devices are so you have a clear idea of what your utility costs truly are.
Why track your usage as a student?
Tracking your usage is important as it lets you know what parts of your home and day to day life are costing you the most. It gives you a clearer idea of where you can cut costs and helps you budget much better than just paying bills blindly. It also lets you get a better understanding of which parts of your home and life are the most cost-effective on the environment if you’re trying to be more earth conscious.
How to Measure Individual Devices
There are a variety of ways you can manage and measure your individual device usage, including smart plugs that have built in energy tracking technology and feed this information directly to your account or an app, energy monitoring devices give real time information based on how much you’re using in certain areas of your home, or by simply contacting your energy supplier to ask which areas are costing you the most. Also, some devices (especially white goods) will come with an energy rating to let you know if they’re environmentally friendly or heavy on power usage.
Tracking The Daily Usage
Using the aforementioned smart devices, you can see how much your energy consumption rises every day, and see if there are certain days or times where it rises or drops greatly. This way you can paint a much clearer picture of just how much power you’re using every day, who is using the most and what areas you’re able to reduce to save money. This also helps make things easier when it comes to negotiating bill splitting with your housemates as there’s no guesswork as to who’s using the most, instead being able to turn to the data.
Making changes according to your usage
Becoming more energy efficient
It’s much easier to switch your devices to standby rather than turning them off, but by switching everything off when you’re not using it, you can save huge amounts in energy, as well as extending the life of your technology devices. The same goes for water, as if you have an electric boiler or heater, it will require more power to heat the water the more you use. Don’t leave taps running and take shorter showers where you can.
Cutting household costs
Turning the heating down and keeping windows/doors closed, turning lights off when you leave a room or simply selling devices that you no longer need can all be ways to cut costs. If there are any unused or unnecessary subscriptions for the household that aren’t being used, for instance, music, film or software subscriptions you once purchased but now are no longer needed, unsubscribe and save yourself the cost.
Working Together To Reduce Energy Spend
One of the best ways to reduce energy consumption and your overall utility costs is to work together to plan your spending. Things like boiling the kettle to make everyone tea or coffee at the same time instead of boiling a whole kettle just to make a single cup, keeping the oven hot and having everyone cook their food one after the other instead of the whole house pre-heating the oven just to cook a single meal.
All Inclusive Bills with The Student Energy Group
Take the stress out of joint bills with The Student Energy Group. Our our student bill packages allow student households to combine all of their utilities including Internet, TV Licence, Water and Energy together in to one simple monthly payment. This way, everyone is exclusively responsible for their own payments rather than everyone else so there’s no bickering or falling out over unpaid bills. And the best part is, we’ll plant a tree for every single sign up, so you get to save money, making student bill splitting easy for you and your housemates, all while saving the planet!
