Our tankless water heater!

I'm really excited! DH got an old shower from a friend, attached it to the outside of the kitchen wall, has installed a new tap on the kitchen sink (which he also got for free) and we now have hot water for washing up without needing to put the immersion heater on!

I am hopeful this will enable us to reduce our electricity by a considerable amount. At the moment we have the immersion heater on for 1 hour a day and I feel that often a lot of that heat is wasted.

We only have a couple of baths per week, so for 5 days of the week we are heating up an entire tank of water for a couple bowls of washing up water. I know I could use the kettle to heat the water, but I do like to have hot water for hand washing - especially for DD as she plays with all sorts of unmentionable things.

We're going to see how we get on with it for a month or so. If it works out really well we will consider investing in a 'real' tankless water heater which we can use for the bath too. The investment will be around £200 but I have a feeling the payback will be quick.

So I'm off to bed and will be switching the immersion heater off until we need a bath - yipee!

Now you're wondering from looking at the photo how I get the water out of the tap, right? There is nothing to turn! Well my creative, genius man has installed a foot switch LOL!

It's tiny piece of wood attached to the kick board and I push my foot against it. Et voila - instant hot water!

He did this because I often have dirty hands from kneading sticky dough or have greasy hands from dealing with butter or oil. Now I don't need to touch the tap to turn it on!

October;s theme - bye bye standby

The theme for October is to turn appliances off standby.

Apparently People in Britain waste more than £740 million worth of electricity each year leaving appliances on standby.

This equates to the average UK household spending up to 8% of their electricity bill by leaving the red light on at night!

The average home has 12 appliances on standby or on charge.

I've got back into good habits lately with turning off the computer peripherals (laser printer and router) before bed. I had been leaving these on.

This week we set up a power down in the bedroom for our monitor, DVD player and surround sound system. This means by turning off the DVD player, it automatically switches off the other appliances.

We have a CD, amp and pre amp in the lounge, but I'm good at switching those off the wall already and we only use it about once a week anyway.

The mobile phone is only charged about once a month as I never use it and I keep it on trickle charge in the car.

Just out of interest; I've also started using my energy monitor again to see what appliances and gadgets are using the most electricity.

• My laptop is using 1/2 kw per day from 7am to 10pm - about 6p.

• The kettle uses 0.9p to boil the water I need for one drink and 2.4p to boil a full kettle so it really does make a difference to boil only the water you need!

• My dehydrator uses 32p to dry a complete load of food - about 2 kws for 8 hours.

• My mobile phone didn't cost anything LOL! I guess it's either a tiny amount or it was already charged more than I thought when I did it this week; I'll have to do it again and see.

I really think we now turn everything off standby, but I will make the effort this month to spend 5 minutes walking around the house before bed to check.