Originally published at: British morning show has "paying energy bill" as a prize | Boing Boing
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In other news: morning news show goes bankrupt due to soaring energy prices.
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No, that has already happened, what is happening now is (partly) because of that deregulation.
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Jesus… Edwina Currie still alive and shambling about with a handbag full of tin foil. ( For putting on her head as well, most convenient.
Welcome to the United fucking Kingdom 2022.
in other news, we get a prime minister we didn’t vote for (again) and certainly one we don’t want.
Huzzah!
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I mean… she’s not wrong. We shouldn’t be living in a time when conservative policies and utter shittery have sent heating bills into the stratosphere while climate change is falling on our heads, but yes, tinfoil will radiate the heat away from the walls and back into the room. Also, put plastic over your windows. You can seal the bottoms edges of windows with duct tape or painters tape, there’s often a draft beneath the frame. Also, if you own your own home and have trees, gather up those leaves in the fall and do NOT burn them or discard them, but bag them and piled the bags around your foundation (we used to use hay bails my grandfather provided from his fields).
Yes, this all sucks. And we’ve been warning about it for decades and been ignored. It’s here now. Let’s help each other get through it best as we can. Winter is coming.
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Prizes coming soon: “water”, “air”, and a very vague “food.”
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We did this before we lost power during the big freeze in Texas. Between sheet plastic over all the windows and back door and towels under the front door, our house remained habitable through 3 days of no power in subfreezing temps.
I suggest a good masking tape- it will come back off again without damage. Also check doors for gaps and redo the weather strips now, before late fall. Consider adding a hatch/insulation tent to attic access in the ceiling. Sealing attic doors with sheet plastic.
If someone owns the home, now is the time to check and replace any caulking. Or stealthily if renting. We’ll be doing that in October. Still bloody hot in Texas.
Make sure all pipes are well insulated.
I’m sure our friends from freezing climes have more tips.
Winter sounds like it’s going to be awful for the UK. I feel for the people living there even as I freak out over Texas’s still-vulnerable grid.
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The U.K. is about to deregulate energy pricing
Umm, citation please? Not sure where you got that idea @beschizza
It is regulated (but perhaps one might say ‘poorly’ or ‘loosely’ so) and the relevant regulation re pricing merely follows market pricing with some restrictions. But it is not about to be further deregulated AFAIK.
ETA but with Loony Liz, who knows?
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None of which will move anybody in the UK’s heating bill more than a percent or two at best. And they are about to go up by orders of magnitude more than this, for the third time in a row.
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Either way, that absolute shower has done absolutely nothing to help real people (i.e., the not obscenely wealthy) re: inflation, inculding energy bills.
That truss creature wants fracking, too, of course.
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More like 15 to 30% depending on your windows, which plastic kits you use, the rest of your home energy consumption and issues, etc. I have heard, however, that doing nothing and complaining vociferously - perhaps even writing a bunch of Sternly Worded Letters - is a viable way of warming oneself once the winter chills have set in.
Look, we’re just trying to offer some suggestions and share them along to help folks out this winter, because everyone knows damn well nothing is going to change fast enough between now and then to stave off what’s coming. You’re welcome to just ignore them.
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Not ignoring, but most UK houses are poorly insulated compared to European standards and the cost to impact that is huge. And as we have seen, there’s no shortage of advice elsewhere about how to save energy, most of which advice completely misses the point. If one’s bill had gone up 5-10% it might be worthwhile advice, but the increases in the UK are multiple orders of magnitude. People could not afford them even if they were half what they are going to be!
And a huge number of people either live in rented accommodation where they would not be able to make such adjustments (which attach to or affect the fabric of their dwelling and would need possibly costly remediation when they leave or may result in them being thrown out), or they simply do not have ANY spare funds at all to even consider any of these. Food and fuel poverty is rife here. When parents are missing meals for 24 hours just so their kids can have one meal a day (‘meal’ - YMMV - a slice of toast?) and are already in debt to the energy firms, none of this advice, however well-intentioned or even however effective, means a damn thing. They simply do not have the capacity to even think about it, let alone implement much of it.
Sorry - did not mean to put a downer on you specifically, but this crisis is not going to be ameliorated in the slightest by people trying to save a few quid with some ad hoc DIY measures. It’s a distraction from the real issue.
ETA just watching Newsnight here: a Midlands garment factory owner says he knows of another company owner whose electric bill just went from £400k per year to £2.1m per year (those price caps only apply to domestic consumers). Today he closed down the business and issued 200 redundancy notices. That’s another, and just as scary, impact of this crisis.
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We’re all sympathetic to the real issues, trust me. And we’ll all keep fighting to try and fix the underlying causes, which should have and could have been dealt with years ago.
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One thing I remember from my student days in college was confining myself to the one room with the radiator, and tacking a heavy blanket over the doorway to the rest of the apartment. It was a significant temperature difference when I needed to exit and use the bathroom.
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Put it on a plate, son. You’ll enjoy it more.
Couldn’t enjoy it any more, Mom.
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I hear you. It must be so frustrating 
I wanted to share what I learned, that helped me when our entire grid went down in freezing weather, in the hopes it might help UK mutants keep from freezing. I know these are not solutions to the terrible winter coming for the UK. The government of the UK has failed its people.
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Sounds familiar.
Looks like that lasted about a year.
I remember that because I remember linking to this:
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