British Gas raise prices by 12.5%

I remember the old VHS tv recorders and the advice was to leave tem on standby rather than power them off. The reason is when powered off the recording heads would get condensation on them and eventually screw up. Standby meant a little bit of power kept everything warm and ticketyboo.

My Sky box uses 20 watts per hour on standby. My tv uses 1 watt every 10 hours. When the TV is on it is using about 80 watts. I think that's more.efficient than older gadgets like the old CRT TVs and monitors.

With everything "off" we burn 100 watts an hour or 2.4kwh a day (about 30p). On non laundry days, we use about 6 kWh a day between 4 of us. So, about 40% of our electricity is just being on standby and the fridge/freezer.

Our older LCD TV on standby seems to use about 5-10 watts per hour.

There was an interesting thing I heard a while back - that despite people saving energy by going to leds, people are buying extra leds and so there is not an energy saving. I'm guilty of that, we have lots of lamps everywhere because I like them and they're cheap to run.

a few years ago--i was given a switching device--the tv plugs into the master socket--blue ray player etc into a slave socket---all goes off at the wall after a few seconds of the tv being switched to standby from the remote ( also LG ) there is another unswitched socket for the digital set box which stays on.

i agree i dont like leaving tv's on stanby all the time---even if only one watt.

They are omnipresent here and have replaced incandescent and fluorescent bulbs completely. I feel as though we've gone back in time to when houses were lit with candles and oil lamps - the amount of illumination is about the same! They've almost completed replacing all the street lights, traffic lights etc., throughout the country with LED clusters which I would imagine will be giving the government quite a saving on its electricity bill.

LED gu10 spotlights.----ive got 10 in my lounge ceiling---running off 2 dimmer switches ( yes--i bought dimmable ones). but--i found that with the dimmers switched to off---there is still a glow from the LED bulbs. so i replaced one in each bank with a halogen bulb to soak up the small current.

ive just re-signed for a year with n-power--after they emailed me saying i will save £100+ by switching from the tariff i'm on now. but i imagine thats b*ll*x----just means i wont be hit with all the increase thats coming down. they estimate i will use £330 for electric and £300 for gas over the year.

yeah right.

Use uswitch - put in how much electricity and gas you use per year and your post code, they find the best deals. I'm currently with Economy Energy but will be swapping to the greener (and cheaper) Tokin (may be the wrong name) soon.

It's not worth staying with the same energy company beyond the end of your fixed price tarrriff. As it happens, EDF were one of the cheaper ones when I checked yesterday - but shop around.

err--in fact i just totalled my billing from 29th july last year ( when we moved in}...to the last one on 5th july last month--say 48 weeks.....£536.29. which is pretty good for a large house--full gas CH--cooking--daily shower. less than i thought.

i bought a lot of non-dimmable LED bulbs from poundland.

for anyone who might ask--the were £1 each.

sorry about that.

I use OVO energy and have a smart meter. I can see what I am using by the week/day/hour and top up as needed.

Nothing to worry about the Tory,s have a plan

Run down the NHS and Social care

Make you work till you are 70

When the older population has died back sufficiently solve the housing problem with bedsits from there houses which now belong to the state and can be further privatised

Ration the Kilowatts you can use before paying huge increases

We have the added complication that there are three types of fitting in everyday usage here - UK bayonet, standard ES and miniature ES. Advisable not to stock-up with new bulbs as there's a good chance you've bought the wrong type!

Fail to understand why we were forced to replace the old incandescent filament bulbs by dodgy CFL bulbs, due to an oppressive EU directive.

Thank God we are leaving the EU.

The Jurrasic period is alive and well

Surprised that you like them so much.

All I remember is slow warm up times, poor light quality, dimmer switches had to be replaced, and everybody stockpiled the old incandescent bulbs because the new cfl's were so crap.

GE admit as much on their website, and have already discontinued production of the CFL bulbs in favour of newer technologies.​

www.ge.com/reports...​