A plumber has warned over three things that must be done to ensure your heating doesn't end up "costing you a fortune."
Tiktok user djmatrix101, a plumbing and heating engineer who shares inside information on how to save money on heating and boiler costs, previously his "top tip" on how to save money on heating bills which was viewed over a million times. He has since returned to warn his audience over three ways they could be costing themselves "a fortune" in heating bills that can be easily, and cheaply, be avoided.
The plumber warned over something all "our grandmas" already know, and recommended a cheap device - that costs under £10 - to solve the problem. He said: " we all remember back in the day when our grandmas had that sausage dog that she used to put against the door and go ballistic if you didn’t put it back after you’d been through.
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" There are more modern equivalents, you can buy a bristle brush that goes across the bottom, Screwfix sell them, [they are] really cheap. They screw to the bottom of the door - stops any draughts getting in and keeps the room warm."
Screwfix sell multiple types of brush draught excluder, that can simply be stuck on the bottom of a door, for less than £10. One, by Stormguard, costs only £6.74 and covers up to 2.5cm of free space.
He added: "It’s really imperative that you use the heat properly, once it gets into the house you don’t want to lose it through open windows, through draughts, through leaving doors open. You need to treat the heat properly, it is money at the end of the day."
He spoke about how your furniture can be preventing your central heating from working properly. He recommended viewers reconsider the placement of their furniture, especially items like couches, in rooms they use often.
He said: "H ow many people have their couches up against the radiator - like slammed up close to a radiator - you do that, all the heat from the radiator will just go straight into the couch and be absorbed and won’t go into the room.
"So a good tip i f you’ve got any pieces of furniture up against a radiator is just to move them an inch or maybe two, as much as you can manage away from the radiator and allow the radiator to breath [and] get into the room instead of going into your furniture and [being wasted] which is what happens."
He then turned his attention to boilers, one of his specialties and spoke about a common problem that "makes your boiler work a lot harder," in turn, leading to steeper heating bills. He said: " If your system's filthy and you’ve got really dirty water inside your system and it's not been looked at, it's not been cleaned, it's not had inhibitor put in and it's just like black sludge t hat’s very very bad.
"Not only for your boiler, but for your bills. Basically, the insides of your radiator break down all the time and create very fine metal filings that go into the water and turn it into black sludge.
" You’ve got to bear in mind that it takes the boiler a lot more energy to heat metal than it does to heat water. So if you’re carrying around a lot of weight in that water that makes the pump not as efficient so the heat isn’t spreading around the house properly.
"It’s making your boiler work a lot harder."
He recommended buying a magnetic boiler filter and having it fitted on the "return" of the boiler, which will remove the metal filings and "sludge" from the water, making it easier to heat and therefore cheaper to operate. He said "everybody makes them, but it doesn't matter which [you buy] as long as there is a filter there of some kind to help keep your boiler clean."
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