Back home, I try to be diligent about my use of electricity, but I’m not really a stickler about it. I like having the porch light on after dark (makes the street safer), I like having one or two tables lights on throughout the house in the evening – I think it just looks nice. I don’t give a lot of thought to the appliances, and I leave the surge power bar on in the office and by the TV day and night. Even the thermostat – the reason the house is kept cooler in the winter is due entirely to my preference not to be too hot, and in the summer, the reason I don’t have the A/C blasting a chilly 18° is because of the impact on the environment, not on my wallet (it helps to live in a bungalow).
But things are so different here. The messaging about utility bills (they’re called ‘rates’ here) is both overt and insidious. The cost of maintaining a house is all people talk about. Orcadians (and really, all Brits) talk about minimizing electricity costs more frequently than Torontonians discuss the cost of gas, or rush hour traffic.
And it’s not just articles in The Guardian about the cheapest way to boil water for tea (kettles use a huge amount of electricity it seems), or Twitter threads with tips on how to save money in your fridge (freeze blocks of water in leftover take-out containers and use them to fill all the empty spaces in the freezer). The house itself is sending you messages all the time – everything turns on and off here. There is a timer on the hot water heater at the far end of the house (in the unheated mudroom, which is tough on a cold morning) and it’s tricky to time it just right for a morning shower (or dog bath). You start thinking (and therefore acting) differently when every single outlet has an on/off switch staring you in the face. I turn off the microwave and oven (cooker) when I’m not using them, ditto the washer/dryer. Every night before bed, I turn off the power bar by my desk. The only appliance in the house I do not turn off daily is the fridge. So unlike my routines in Milton.
My landlord was by yesterday, and he commented that he was surprised I’d chosen to use the ‘sunroom’ with all its windows and high ceilings as my sitting room, and not the smaller, darker living room at the front of the house. It doesn’t have central heating in there, but it has an electric heater that I could turn on only when needed – much cheaper than leaving the central heating in the sunroom on. And he felt bad that he hadn’t supplied an outdoor drying line for my laundry. It’s almost winter here and it will now rain at some point every day for the next seven months, and yet Orcadians will continue to hang out their laundry. I said I was fine with the drying racks in the mudroom and using the dryer, but I could tell he was concerned about what that was going to cost me.
Honest to goodness, while it’s not ALL I think about, minimizing my rates is never far from the forefront of my thoughts. (Have to stop typing now, as I can see from across the room that the heating has turned off again – it does that randomly throughout the day/night – I think it disapproves of my leaving it running 24/7.)