Things I wish I'd known at the start of winter

1. Closing the lounge door makes the lounge warm up a LOT. We have nice big North-facing windows in our lounge which warm the room up nicely (just not the entire house).

2. We're on night rates power. From 9 pm to 7 am we pay 19 cents per kw/h, but in the daytime we pay 29 cents per kw/h (!). The price difference is because during peak hours (day time) power generation companies often have to bring their coal plants online, which is expensive. So it's both cheaper (if you're on night rates) and better for the environment (regardless) to use power at night. We've started turning our hot water cylinder off during the day, and only turning it on every other night, which saves us a good chunk off our power bill. Contact energy has a nifty little graph thing on their website so you can see your hourly power usage. Our usage drops down to nearly nil during the daytime now, when it was pretty constant before. We're also using less power in total by turning the cylinder off. We have a moderately insulated cylinder with a sleeping bag wrapped around it, so it stays warm enough for 2-3 showers over the full two days We try to do our washing in the evening now too, even though all our loads are now done in cold water the washing machine will still use a reasonable amount of power. If we need to have the oven on for something other than dinner we try to do it either while the oven is already hot anyway, or after 9 pm.

3. We can use the heat pump and it won't cost a fortune. The heat pump is set to turn on for 15 minutes at 6:45 am to warm the lounge to 16 degrees while we're still on night rates. It normally takes .8 kw hours to do this, so it costs us about 15 cents per day, and it means that the lounge isn't freezing when we get up. It also dries the condensation on the windows and gives the sun a good kick start so that by noon the lounge is normally about 17-18 degrees.

4. Sew the curtain linings onto the lounge window first. I did the bedroom (also a large window) at the atart of winter, but we heat the lounge...