62 Saturday June 11 2022 | the timesMoney
need 46.5kWh of energy a day, accord-
ing to calculations by the pool supply
firm Poolstore.
That assumes the water is heated to
25 degrees and stays there all day, falls
a degree overnight and needs to be
heated again in the morning. How
much it costs to do that depends on the
method you use and its efficiency.
According to Poolstore, an electric
pool heater is 92 per cent efficient, so
would need 50.22kWH to heat the pool.
If you heated your pool all year round,
that would be £5,195 a year, but could
cost £7,584 from October.
A gas pool heater is more like 85 per
cent efficient, so it would require
53.5kWh to produce the 46.5kWh
needed to heat the pool every day.
Because of the 7.37p per kWh price of
gas it would cost £1,439 — potentially
£2,100 from October.
Larger pools are more likely to have
an electric heat pump, which is the
most efficient method because they can
pull heat from the air that you don’t
have to pay for. Poolside estimated a
heat pump would only need 4.65kWh aS
ince the energy price cap is due
to increase again in October, it
may be time to cover up the hot
tub, drain that heated swim-
ming pool and unplug your
wine fridge. We have read the manuals
and done the sums to work out exactly
how much these home luxuries are
costing you to run.Aghast at the Aga
There’s a term for the cost of running
that enormous oven: Aganomics. And
it is not getting smaller.
One Aga owner in particular may be
feeling the heat, according to the com-
parison site Uswitch. It estimates that
Jamie Oliver’s Essex home will cost
68 per cent more to run this year than
last. The £48,561 annual energy
cost is partly down to running an
Aga (and perhaps the bigger
culprit, his swimming pool).
Yet the TV chef is not facing
the biggest increase —
Uswitch said that the singer
Taylor Swift’s UK energy bill
will go up 81 per cent this year.
The largest Agas come with four
or more ovens, most of which are de-
signed to be left on all the time because
they take a few hours to heat up. The
stove tops can be switched on and off.
Older Agas tended to run on gas from
your boiler, or even oil, but the com-
pany now makes electric models with
economy modes designed to reduce
energy consumption. A five-oven elec-
tric version costs about £15,000.
They are more costly to run because
electricity costs 28.34p per kWh
(assuming you are on your supplier’s
default tariff, which is limited by the
energy regulator Ofgem’s price cap) —
four times the price of gas at 7.37p per
kWh.
According to estimated usage figures
from Aga, if left on all year, a traditional
four-oven gas Aga would consume
27,404kWh of energy. That would cost
£2,020 a year to run at the price capped
rate for gas. Assuming that the price of
gas rises 46 per cent in October, as the
energy market analyst Cornwall In-
sight estimated last week, it would cost
about £2,950 a year.
For an electric Aga, such as the R3
150-4i, the running cost would be
£2,396 a year, based on 8,445kWh of
consumption from keeping three of its
ovens running all the time, and without
touching it’s conventional fan oven,
which costs more. If the prices go up as
expected in October, it could cost about
£3,500 a year.
There is the caveat that an Aga dou-
bles as heating in the kitchen, saving
you a bit of money on energy
bills. According to Ovo Energy,
old houses need 200kWh per
square metre to heat them each
year, so for a 15sq m kitchen it
would cost you about £22 a year
in gas central heating. New
houses are twice as efficient, so
it would cost closer to £11. Still,
maybe switch that Aga off and
cook on the hob or in the micro-
wave instead.Hot tubs
Hot tubs were an incredibly
popular purchase during the
first lockdown thanks to the
combination of lovely weather,pulling on a pair of slippers instead.
There are two main types of underfloor
heating: “wet” and “dry”. Wet heating
uses a network of water pipes heated by
your boiler underneath your floors,
while the dry version use a network of
wires heated with electricity.
The energy consumption to heat a
10sq m room via underfloor heating is
about 1,600kWh a year, according to
underfloor heating supplier Nu-Heat,
compared with 2,000kWh for central
heating in an old house or 1,000kWh in
a new-build according to Ovo Energy.
At 1,600kWh, wet heating powered
by gas would cost £117 and dry heating
powered by electricity would cost a
whopping £453. This compares with
£65 for wet heating before April and
£333 for dry heating. From October
they could cost £170 and £660 respec-
tively. Central heating would cost
about £147 to heat the same
room in an old house and
about £74 in a new one. So
wet underfloor heating
might still work out
cheaper if you have
an old house that
isn’t very energy
efficient.Smart door-
bells
As we shop on-
line more,
people seem to
want to be able to
see their delivery
driver in case they
throw their parcel into
a bin or leave it on the
doorstep to get stolen. Smart
doorbells, such as those made by Ring,
are increasingly popular.
But how much do they cost to run?
Most people power them with batteries
that you replace when they run out, but
you can also wire them up to the mains
or plug them into a wall socket. Ring’s
£219.99 Video Doorbell Pro 2 can have
a power adapter to go into a socket or be
wired into the mains.
The hardwired version consumes
10W, the adapter version 12W. If left onboredom and, for some people, nothing
better to spend their money on.
The auction site eBay reported a
1,080 per cent rise in sales in the
week from April 5 in 2020, compared
with the same week a year before.
(There was also a spike in reports of
hot tub-related scams, accidents and
complaints).
Yet it may be time to replace the tub
with a paddling pool because even if
you ignored the cost of the water, the
cost of heating one is huge.
Lay-Z-Spa’s £899 Napa AirJet hot tub
can hold 1,123 litres of water at up to 40
degrees. It uses an electric heat pump
that plugs into your mains. The product
details give a consumption figure of
2,050W for heating the tub to 20C. That
would be 2.05kWh for every hour it was
used, so 58p per hour.
If you were heating it to 40C, it could
cost £1.16 an hour. If you used it for two
hours twice a week that would be 208
hours of usage a year costing about
£240. From October, when prices go up,
it could be £350. Many hot tubs are de-
signed to be on all the time, so the costs
could really add up.Heating a swimming pool
If you really want to live the good life
you will have gone the whole hog and
installed a heated swimming pool. If
you had 40,000 litres of water, which is
what it would take to fill a 4m x 5m pool
2m deep, heated to 25C, you wouldday to heat 40,000l. That would cost
£480 a year, rising to about £700 by
October.
According to Uswitch, Elton John’s
swimming pool will help to push the
cost of running his £6.5 million man-
sion in Windsor to £77,000 this year,
up 76 per cent on last year.Pizza ovens
The running costs of a pizza oven are
not limited by Ofgem’s price cap
because many run on bottled propane
gas or charcoal — but that doesn’t
mean they haven’t become more ex-
pensive.
The Wayback Machine, a website
that archives old webpages, said that
the price of a 5kg canister of propane
from Calor was £60.49 in November- If you had an old canister you
could refill it for £20.50.
Now, it’s £62.24 for a new
bottle and £22.25 to refill, in-
creases of 2.9 per cent and
8.5 per cent respective-
ly. Propane is a by-
product of natural
gas and petrole-
um processing,
so has been af-
fected by
wholesale
price rises.
Pizza ovens
from Ooni
consume 350g
of propane an
hour, so you
would get about 14
hours of cooking time
per 5kg bottle, which
could last you a year.
Charcoal has also become more
expensive. In April last year an 8kg bag
of maple lumpwood charcoal sold by
Big Green Egg cost £23, now it is £25 —
an 8.7 per cent increase.
Underfloor heating
Could there be anything nicer than
being able to walk round the house in
bare feet in winter? Well, given the rise
in energy prices, you might be switch-
ing your underfloor heating off andIs it time to drain your hot
tub and turn off that Aga?
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a yearWine
fridgeTaylor Swift’s
energy bills are
up 81 per centThe cost of running
Elton John’s mansion
could hit £77,000 a year
The cost of living is going up and the more energy you consume, the more you will
have to pay. George Nixon crunches the numbers for those living in luxury