A few tips to reduce your heating bills

Your central heating is probably your biggest household bill, so even small improvements to your system’s efficiency can save you a packet.

Is your radiator system clean?

Having cold spots on your radiators, or some that take ages to heat, could mean your system is sludgy. Keeping the water in your pipes clean and sludge-free will make your heating system more efficient, besides helping to preserve the life of your boiler and central heating system. It can also help reduce your bills.

If you’re getting a new boiler, a clean system is also essential to validate the manufacturer’s warranty on your new boiler, so get your installer to complete the Benchmark commissioning document to say your system’s clean.

You can try checking the water yourself by bleeding a little into a container from a radiator valve, but be aware that much of the dirt in the system will sit at the bottom.

Maybe you need a system flush.

You could do a flush by draining the water in your radiator system and replacing it with new clean water. A Power Flush is more thorough but needs specialist equipment and can be expensive. A chemical flush is gentler and doesn’t need high pressure equipment. And it’s a lot cheaper than a power flush.

A chemical inhibitor added after the flush will help to stop sludge build up. A magnetic filter can also be effective at keeping your system water clean. In a hard water area, a water softening filter will help prevent limescale build up on critical boiler parts.

Is your boiler on the right setting?

It only needs to be on the highest setting in the depths of winter, otherwise it’s wasting energy - and money. And while you can’t realistically adjust the settings to suit the changing weather, a weather compensating thermostat and load compensating thermostat will do that for you.

They adjust the settings on your boiler to suit the temperature, making your heating system much more efficient. (A weather compensating thermostat adjusts the settings on your boiler to suit the outside temperature. A load compensating thermostat does this to suit the inside temperature of your home.)

Are your radiators balanced?

If not, you’ll spend more heating up your home. In an unbalanced system, with the thermostat set to 20 degrees, the upstairs might reach 23 degrees while downstairs could still be too cold.

Turning up the thermostat to compensate will overheat the upstairs, leading to higher bills. Yet turning your thermostat down by just one degree can save £75 a year on your heating, according to the Energy Saving Trust.

Having a new boiler will mean re-balancing your system. After the installation, ask for proof that your system has been balanced before paying for the installation. And run the heating for a few hours to check that your system is properly balanced.

Is yours a condensing boiler?

If it has a condensation drain pipe as well as the flue gas pipe, then it’s a condensing boiler, as all modern boilers are, meaning they reuse previously wasted heat from the boiler’s exhaust gases. Condensing boilers are at least 10% more efficient than old style boilers, so they save money on your heating bills.

But is your condensing boiler actually condensing?

Condensing boilers recover heat that would usually be lost from combustion gases, and transfer it to the cooler water from your radiator system. But condensing boilers only condense if the return water is at around 55 degrees or lower. If it’s at a higher temperature, your boiler isn’t condensing.

Make sure your boiler is condensing by not setting the boiler temperature too high. 70 degrees should ensure that it condenses. That said, a dirty or poorly balanced system will also impact on the return temperature of the water to your boiler and its ability to condense.

To know if your condensing boiler is condensing, check the temperature of the water return flow pipe with a digital thermometer, then check the inflow pipe temperature. A healthy heating heating system will have a 20 degree difference.