Truly the Aga is the heart of our house and yet… with our monthly electricity bill already around £400-500, my heart is growing cold. For the first time this autumn we’re baulking at switching it back on. At the start of October, the quarterly Ofgem price cap rose again. It’s estimated that this winter, the ceiling for a typical annual dual-fuel bill will rise by 2 per cent to £1,755. As our older Aga doesn’t have multiple heat settings like new models (it’s either on full-whack or it’s off), daily running costs are somewhere between £7-10 a day. We’ll have burnt through the average fuel bill well before Christmas.
As we never have the central heating on during the day and I already spend November-April wearing thermals under my clothes, most of which are bought second-hand on Vinted, I can’t see another option. We’ve shopped around for tariffs more frequently than Imelda Marcos bought shoes, and ditched the weekly Waitrose delivery to push a trolley round Lidl. There isn’t a lot of fat left to trim.
Out here in the sticks, we don’t have gas. When we started renovating our house, which hadn’t been touched for 40 years, we congratulated ourselves on both our environmental credentials and swerving off future oil hikes by installing a biomass boiler. But when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, any smugness evaporated on learning that most of the wood pellets it guzzles come from… eastern Europe.
