The Frugal Life: Utilities

The frugal grumps

Sat, 31 May 2008 06:57:02 GMT

Well, I’m afraid that you find me feeling altogether a bit grumpy today, and it’s not just the miserable weather we’ve had this week. I wish that I could say it was all down to my outrage at the pathetic so-called ‘fuel poverty action plan’ (fuel poverty no-action plan, more like!) unveiled by the government this week, which they claim will help people struggling to pay their energy bills, but that many poverty and age-related charities have criticised as next to useless. Four million people are thought to be suffering in fuel poverty while our MPs are clamouring for inflation-busting pay rises and grants so they no longer have to suffer the indignity of having their expense claims made public! The hypocrisy of it all makes my blood boil! And more price rises are predicted, so what will people do?

But frankly this isn’t really what’s at the root of my bad mood. I’m grumpy because the old frugal wallet has taken something of an unexpected and unwanted bashing this week. No less than two pets have been taken sick and I’ve had to splash out on vets appointments and treatments, which is hardly ideal. Dougal the cat has been up to his old tricks again of getting into punch-ups and got yet another abscess thanks to a bite from a sparring partner, which cost a tidy £60 to clean up. Luckily unlike last autumn when he had one before, it didn’t have to be lanced (eek…apologies for the gory details), which would have been closer to £200 – some small comfort I suppose. But I’m not sure whether I can claim anything back on the pet insurance policy I still hold for him – not that it would be much because of the excess - because he’s had the condition before.

And part of the recovery process has involved keeping him indoors all day and night, to avoid him meeting up with his fight club mates again and opening up the wound. This is proving to be a total nightmare as he is a confirmed outdoor cat who gets bored to death inside. I have barely slept over the past three nights because of the incessant howling, whinging and scratching at the door. All I can say is that I saw someone on our local Freecycle email is offering a cat’s Christmas dressing up outfit to give away, and another sleepless night and Dougal will soon find himself kitted out as Santa’s little helper in revenge…At least he hasn’t spurned the ground-up antibiotics in his food for once…

Poor Ellie the lizard was also feeling under the weather and was taken to the vets too, which while not very serious (worms…yuck) was another £59 - the downside to keeping exotic pets as vets tend to charge extra to impart their specialist reptile knowledge. Here’s wishing both poor chaps a speedy recovery.

Have a great weekend. xxx Piper

Are you struggling to pay your energy bills? What do you think the government and energy companies should do to help people finding it difficult to pay for heat and energy? Leave a comment and let me know.

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Frugal breakdown

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:11:23 GMT

We must have offended the mechanical gods somehow as slowly but surely things have begun breaking down at home. First of all, last week the bathroom light refused to turn off. I’d pull and pull the cord to no avail, and then eventually it would turn off, until the inevitable happened one evening and it came away in my hand.

Then I used the electronic kitchen scales and for some inexplicable reason felt compelled to clean them by throwing them into a bowl of water in the sink. Surprise, surprise when an error message came up on it and it died a small electronic death.

“Don’t worry – we just need to dry out the batteries in it,” said the ever patient DJ, when I admitted what I’d done. But it’s been drying out for about three days and still doesn’t work, which is a bit of a pain.

So what, I hear you say. It’s annoying but trivial stuff. True, but then came the biggie on Sunday night. I was busy cooking a roast dinner after a snowy day and was nicely warmed by the heat of the oven, so it took me a while to realise that the house was gradually getting colder and colder. Perhaps I’d turned the thermostat down too far on the heating, I thought. No – all the dials were as they should be and the heating should be on. I ran around the house feeling all the radiators and found, with a shiver of dread and, well, simply the cold, that they were all stone cold. But the boiler was happily buzzing along as though everything was working as normal. Sure enough, the central heating had packed in and it was a bank holiday so any self-respecting engineer would slap on a big fat call-out charge. We decided the most frugal option was to sit it out and arrange for an engineer to come out today. I looked in the Yellow Pages and found a corgi registered guy.

Never mind, I thought. We still have the old gas fire in the lounge which we hardly ever use but kicks out a fierce heat. To add insult to injury, when we put it on the heat was strangely pathetic, suggesting there was something wrong with the overall gas supply. Instead I had to dig out the electric fan heater I bought recently which was annoying, knowing that it is probably pretty expensive heat. But we were very grateful for it yesterday I must admit. DJ was quite happy messing around in the garden to keep warm, but I threw a temper tantrum – I hate being cold and I really feel it – and demanded to be taken out to a local retail park to keep warm! We went to bed fully dressed with jumpers and socks on and shared a meagre hot water bottle between us.

When Tuesday came I was sorely embarrassed, however. Sure, forgetting to get the boiler serviced this year was a false economy, as Charlie the engineer uncovered the cobwebs in our ancient back-boiler, which lies behind our hideous c1981 fireplace. But when he asked where our gas meter was he discovered that all the clutter in our cupboard under the stairs (where I hide the recycling bags) had pushed the gas lever down so far that the supply was almost cut off! Talk about humiliating! At least DJ was at work and didn’t have to share in the embarrassment. On the plus side, we got a radiator in the spare room fixed, the boiler serviced and the pilot light fixed for a total of £75, which wasn’t too bad in the end. I’d been dreading Charlie would tell us we needed a new boiler installed.

So the moral of this story is, get your boiler serviced and don’t keep a lot of clutter in your under-stairs cupboard…

Do you get your boiler serviced or is it a waste of money? Do you do your own DIY or is it money well spent getting the professionals in? Let me know

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E by gum

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:28:55 GMT

Oh dear…I knew yesterday’s blog about the commercialisation of Mother’s Day would get me in trouble in the end, despite my attempts to encourage my dearest Mamma not to read it. This morning I received a terse text from her, saying “Guessed a frugal Mother’s Day would be on the cards!” Oops…there goes what’s left of my inheritance to a cats’ home…! But then no one said living the frugal life would be easy….

Now, moving swiftly on, in my crushing ignorance, I shamefully have to admit that I’d never actually heard of it before, but apparently this Wednesday has been designated E-day. No, it’s not got anything whatsoever to do with email, Ebay or even ET – it’s Energy Saving Day. The idea is that between 6pm on Wednesday 27 Feb and 6pm on Thursday 28 Feb when E-day runs – which should be easy for Londoners to remember as it’s somewhat reminiscent of Tube strike schedules! - we are all encouraged to turn off unused household electrical appliances which we all have a terribly lazy habit of leaving on standby. E-day’s organisers say the point of it all is to try and demonstrate how small contributions to saving energy can add up and hopefully help combat climate change.

And no, it’s not a bunch of well-meaning hippies who have put this together – it’s actually supported by a big line up both from business and charity, including Christian Aid, Greenpeace, Tesco, NPower, the National Trust, Scottish Power and Eon.

E-day’s organisers say we should do little things like turn off lights in rooms that are being unused, not leave TVs or printers on standby and stop leaving our mobiles to charge all night long. I have to admit that I’ve got quite vigilant in turning off the telly and printer when I'm not using them, but I do frequently forget and leave my mobile charging all night and my laptop on sleep mode because it’s really slow to get connected to the internet when I turn it on. Very naughty.

And according to USwitch.com, it’s not just me but 9m households in the UK who charge up gadgets overnight.

40 per cent of consumers - like me - leave pcs and laptops on standby all the time, while half of us charge our 22m mobiles every day because we’re terrified they might go dead and cut us off from our social network. Craziness! Just a few years ago I can remember swearing I’d never get one! And until I introduced DJ to the digital world by presenting him with my old phone and a pay-as-you-go account five years ago (yes…it's true, I wanted to keep my beady eye on him!) he was still ringing people up using a payphone in the street! Now look at us both doing our bit to ruin the planet...Oh dear...Something needs to change.

It might not seem like much, but I am going to try and do my bit for E-Day by letting my phone go dead and turning off my laptop. Who knows, maybe I’ll even have a conversation with DJ instead of spending the evening staring at the box or surfing the web, and save money on our electricity bills while we’re at it.

Will you be taking part in E-Day? Do you think it will make any difference to climate change or your pocket?

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If only TalkTalk would walk the walk

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 13:32:45 GMT

And preferably off a plank if you ask me! Sorry, I’m writing a complaint letter to the Carphone Warehouse and feeling cross, as well as empowered as complaint letters have always made me feel. Right from when I first complained, as a precocious seven year old, to the Post Office that the pack of cards I’d sent away for from a Rice Krispie packet turned up late and squashed (no doubt by some beer-bellied postman who decided to sit on it instead of showing up for work). I was appalled by Romford Post Office’s sarcastic response.

But this time it isn’t the Post Office in my angry sights but Charles Dunstone’s outfit. Recently I was cold-called by TalkTalk about their new service offering free broadband for life. Normally I would tell such callers to push off but for once I was in a good mood and it sounded like a good frugal deal so I was persuaded. Despite the fact DJ pointed out we were tied into a 12 month contract with Orange. I’m sure we can get around this, I told him.

Well, a few weeks later we had no broadband at all. Somehow the TalkTalk service knocked out our Orange service and the TalkTalk kit didn’t work. Unfortunately both of us were busy at work and had no time to spend hanging on for 20 minutes on a call centre line to complain so we put up with it for a few weeks, until I had a hour spare to call TalkTalk and say we wanted to switch back to BT. Eventually after about 15 minutes on hold I got through to a very aggressive Liverpudlian gentleman who wanted to know why we hadn’t called before. He then told me if I switched back to BT TalkTalk would probably charge me £70. I certainly wasn’t told this when I signed up! When I asked why TalkTalk were effectively forcing their customers into staying with them he got rather angry and shouted down the phone at me. Eventually he calmed down and offered to send another internet CD to see if this would work. But my mind was made up. £70 fee or no £70 fee I was going back to BT. I spoke to a lady at BT who actually had some manners. Unfortunately I had to pay a reconnection charge though.

Anyway, I’d forgotten about it all but was alarmed this week when I received a TalkTalk bill for the October- November period – especially when we’d switched back to BT in September AND lost our old number thanks to TalkTalk. So I queried it. TalkTalk told me the account was defunct but that as well as £20 that month they’d helped themselves to via direct debit they would soon be taking the £70 daylight robbery fee. I told the customer services operative, who was at least polite this time, that I wished to complain. There was no actual person to complain to (!) but she ordered me a ‘complaints callback’. Hilariously, the next day the phone rang. I picked it up and after a delay an automatic message kicked in. “It’s TalkTalk here…how would you like free calls?” a voice said. I couldn’t believe it. They’d given me a sales call instead of a complaints call! TalkTalk about the final insult! I have cancelled my direct debit forthwith and look forward to a good old-fashioned row. Not a frugal choice whatever they might tell you. And this list of Carphone Warehouse's principles made me laugh.

What's your experience of broadband/phone operators been lately? Leave a comment & let me know.

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