64 Saturday May 28 2022 | the timesMoney
a week at 170C. That works out at about
21p per hour, £1.05 a week.
But you could use your oven less by
batch cooking. If you cooked a double
portion two nights a week and ate the
leftovers on two days so that you only
cooked five nights a week you would
save about 30p a week, and potentially
more if you also boiled less water and
used the hob less as a result.
If you need a new oven then one of
the most energy efficient models is the
AEG BPK948330B.
Let anything you’re going to freeze
cool to room temperature first, so your
freezer doesn’t have to work as hard(this will also reduce risk of food poi-
soning). When defrosting, leave the
item in the fridge overnight rather than
microwaving just before you need it.
An 800W microwave has a power
consumption of about 1270W (like
everything it’s not 100 per cent effi-
cient), although the defrost mode gen-
erally uses about 30 per cent of that,
about 381W. If you defrosted something
in the microwave for 10 minutes it
would use 1.8p of electricity you could
save by letting it defrost in the fridge.0 Will a slow cooker save me money?
It can take about eight hours to cook astew in a slow cooker on a low heat,
compared with about three hours to
cook the same stew in a typical fan oven
at a cost of about 60p.
Lakeland’s 6l slow cooker on its low
setting consumes 90w with a six-to-
eight-hour cooking time. For eight
hours that’s 0.72kWh, or 20.4p of elec-
tricity. On high it consumes 120w and
takes three to four hours. Assuming
four hours, that’s a consumption of
0.48kWh, or 13.6p of electricity.
So the cheapest option is to use the
slow cooker, particularly on a high set-
ting, but it does depend on what you are
cooking. If you could make the meal inParents can receive £2 for every £8
paid into a tax-free childcare accountFamilies let £3 billion in tax-free childcare go unclaimed
S
ome £3 billion of childcare support
is going unclaimed despite more
families using tax-free childcare to
help make ends meet.
About 384,000 families used the
childcare scheme for 458,000 children
in March 2022, according to data from
HM Revenue & Customs — the highest
monthly figure since the scheme was
launched in 2017.
Families can claim up to £2,000 a
year per child under 11 towards child-
care costs. For every £8 you pay, the
government will add £2. Parents must
be working and earn the equivalent of
minimum wage for 16 hours a week or
more. Neither parent can earn more
than £100,000 a year.To enter the scheme, you need to set
up an account on gov.uk. You can then
use the account to pay any childcare
provider on the government’s approved
list, which includes childminders, nur-
series, nannies, after-school clubs and
play schemes. You must sign in every
three months to confirm that your de-
tails are correct and you remain eligible
for the scheme.
More than 510,000 families used the
scheme for help with childcare costs in
the 2021-22 tax year, but there are still
almost 800,000 families who are eligi-
ble but are not using the handout, ac-
cording to the wealth manager AJ Bell.
The average family in the UK has
1.9 children. If parents claimed £2,000for every eligible child, it would cost the
government an extra £3 billion a year.
“The tax-free childcare scheme is not
well advertised by the government,
with many families not knowing it ex-
ists or how they can use it,” said Laura
Suter from AJ Bell, an investment plat-
form.
“There is also a common misconcep-
tion that it’s only available for pre-
school children, when it can actually be
claimed until children are 11, or 17 if they
are disabled.”
You can claim tax-free childcare even
if you are not eligible for child benefit,
and you can use it alongside the 30-
hours free scheme, which entitles you to
30 hours of free childcare a week in termtime for children aged three or four.
Last year the government polled
parents to find out why there was such
low take up of the tax-free childcare
scheme, and found that the administra-
tive burden of using it, having to recon-
firm details every three months and the
complication of logging on to govern-
ment systems were the key barriers.
Suter said: “As the government hunts
for ways to help ease rising costs for
households, one easy win would be
streamlining the tax-free childcare
scheme and launching an awareness
campaign to drive up usage, rather than
leaving £3 billion on the table that could
be helping working families.”
Imogen TewI
t might be getting into summer
now, but even if you’ve turned the
heating off, your energy bills are
still more expensive since the price
cap rise in April. Every unit of elec-
tricity you use is 33 per cent more ex-
pensive than it was before April and
every unit of gas is 75 per cent more —
and they will rise again in October.
The only sure-fire way to keep a lid
on your bills is to cut how much you’re
using. But not all energy saving tips are
equal. Here are the ones worth doing.0 Before you start...
You need to work out how much energy
the appliances in your home consume.
You’ll find power consumption infor-
mation in those dusty old booklets for
your dishwasher, microwave or fish
tank, or you can look up a device online.
If this is in watts you’ll need to con-
vert it to kilowatt hours (kWh), the
standard unit of energy measurement
for electricity and gas prices.
To do this multiply the watts by the
number of hours you use a device for at
a time then divide it by 1,000 (the
number of watts in a kWh). If you use a
device for minutes instead of hours,
multiply the watts by the minutes then
divide by 60 first.
Multiply your kWh figure by the cost
of your gas or electricity to find out how
much each use costs.
For example if you have a 2,500w ket-
tle that takes two minutes to boil you
would multiply 2,500 by two to get
5,000, then divide by 60 to get 83.33. Di-
vide by 1,000 and you get 0.0833kWh.
You then multiply this by the price
you are paying per kWh of electricity —
under Ofgem’s latest energy price cap it
is 28.34p (for gas it’s 7.37p) and you get
2.36, or 2.36p to boil the kettle.
A further wrinkle, though, is that the
product information cannot always be
taken at face value. If you want a more
precise reading, you can use an electri-
city monitor or consumption meter.
You can plug this in between the mains
socket and your appliance to see how
much it costs to run. They are available
online for about £15.
Efficiency makes a big difference to
the cost of appliances. The most
energy-efficient fridge-freezer, the LG
GBB92MCBAP, costs £40.63 a year to
run at the current price cap, according
to the consumer group Which?, while
the least efficient fridge it tested, the
Hotpoint FFU3D W 1, costs £178.66.
When you need a new appliance,
check the energy rating before you buy.
The most efficient are graded A.0 Should I boil my water in a kettle
or on the stove?
If you’re boiling water to cook pasta
should you fill up the pan with boiling
water or boil it on the stove?
Boiling one litre of water from 20C to
100C requires 0.09kWh of energy, but
because the appliances we use to heat it
are not 100 per cent efficient the energy
used will be more.
An electric kettle is about 80 per cent
efficient, so would take 20 per cent
more energy to boil the same litre of
water, while a gas hob is about 30 per
cent efficient and need 70 per cent
more. A kettle would use 0.11kWh to
boil one litre, and the hob would use
0.15kWh and do it slower.
But even though it takes longer and is
worse for the environment, boiling
water on a gas hob is cheaper, costing 1p
a litre versus 3p in an electric kettle
because gas is cheaper per kWh.
Modern electric hobs can be about as
efficient as a kettle, while induction
hobs can be up to 90 per cent efficient.
If you’re worried about the environ-
ment, use the kettle, if money is the pri-
ority and you have a gas hob, use that.
More crucial is to boil only as much
as you need. A standard mug is about
300ml, which would require 0.03kWh
of electricity to boil in a kettle, costing
1p. That’s against 3p to boil 1l or 5p if you
filled up a full 1.7l kettle.0 Would buying a big chest freezer
help me save money in the long run?
Everyone seems to be embracing bulk-
buying, batch-cooking and deep-
freezing food to save money on shop-
ping and cooking. It’s certainly a good
way of cutting down on food waste. But
be wary of getting an additional appli-
ance — it’s still cheaper to run one large
fridge-freezer than a small fridge and
bigger chest freezer.
A small fridge with a capacity of
about 34l uses about 61kWh, so would
cost about £17 to run a year. Add to that
a medium-sized chest freezer with a
capacity of 150l to 299l and you con-
sume roughly 230kWh a year, costing
about £65 and taking the total to £81.40
The LG fridge-freezer found by
Which? to be the most energy efficient
has 233l of fridge space and 107l of
freezer space, and costs £40.63 a year to
run, so you would be doubling your
costs to get that extra freezer space.
But where there is money to be saved
is in how you cook, freeze and defrost.
Which? said that a typical electric fan
oven costs about £55 a year to run on
average, based on five hours of cookingThe energy saving tips that
Check an
appliance’s
energy rating
before you buy
2p
saved by boiling
a litre of water on
a gas hob instead of
in an electric kettleWe’re always told to take fewer baths and turn off
the TV, but not all recommendations save money.
George Nixon does the maths on the myths
Electric kettles are efficient but not always cheaper