While I was in Canberra my son and DiL used my house for a night, they left a fan and a light running.
I do have lights on timers and a modern light uses bugger all electricity. An 11watt LED bulb can run for nearly four days before it uses 33c of electricity ((ie 1kWh). The fan is a different matter.
Yeah, Mrs Fox moans about me leaving lights on wasting money when they are all LED’s and use hardly any power at all…
However, Mrs Fox boils the kettle several times a day and forgets to make a drink with the contents…She also leaves her iron plugged in for long periods of down time, and you can never visit our house without the sound of the washing machine humming away in the background…
Save money she says… 
The only thing I leave on when I leave the house is the refrigerator.
Everything else is turned off at the power-point.
I have no electric clocks.
Ha Ha I had to laugh, my wives were exactly the same.
Anything that involves heating tends to use more electricity than anything else - kettles, space/fan heaters and stoves particularly. Motors are probably next, Washing machines, fans etc, close behind are probably TVs,computers and the like - finally lights.
The only exception are incandescent lights and those old halogen lights but who has any of them these days?
I must admit I am not fussy about turning things off at the power point, I like the fact that the TV comes on instantly when left powered up. I also have three NASs rrunning all the time too. However my electric bill is only $220 to $250 a quarter (£110 to £225) which I don’t think is too bad. The next bill will be a bit higher because I ran the fan heater more than usual this winter but it won’t be unaffordable (and that is the key).
I think many of us might be guilty of boiling up more water than we need in the kettle.
LED lighting is great. Might be able to save a bit of electricity by turning them off but leaving them on not as bad as when light bulbs were anything from 25w to 150w.
My Swedish sister in law back in the 1960s used to leave the lights on all the time (it drove me up the wall in the UK).
This was in the days of incandescent bulbs, these bulbs used to suffer from thermal shock when they were turned on or off. Apparently in Sweden with their hydroelectric power using the electricity was cheaper than buying new bulbs because turning them on and off shortened their life
I’ve been doing this for years. These days you have smart hotplates that can guess if the pot isn’t there. Although sometimes that can be annoying if you’re cooking.
My dad used to go around the house back in the 70s turning off any lights if there was nobody in the room. In those days every penny counted. Of course despite grumbling in those days, I do the same because the wasting electricity message becomes so ingrained.
I had an ‘amusing’ experience with my late mother once, regarding leaving a tap running.
For some reason, she used to leave her own kitchen tap running for a long time; I never understood why, and she wouldn’t explain. If I turned it off, she’d turn it on again! She was on the old rateable value payment method for water, so she didn’t care. 
Anyway, she came to stay with me one Christmas, and I went out for about three hours, and when I got back, my kitchen tap was running at full blast! I am on a meter!
I was livid, absolutely livid, and I told her in no uncertain terms what she had now cost me in extra water charges.
She did offer me the money, and I took it, to jolly well teach her a lesson!
Honestly, it felt like the parent/child roles had reversed! 
Did your mother ever give a reason for her unusual behaviour?
No, never! (She was a very impatient person, and found it hard to cope with questions, or perceived criticism).
Sometimes it was her way of washing a cup, say, that she’d just been drinking out of, but not always.
Although she hating spending money, because the water rates didn’t vary with her water usage, she wasn’t concerned at all, but I think I drummed the point home when she wasted mine! 
I may be getting a water meter in the near future (had a letter saying it could be in the pipeline) so I’ve started rationing it more. Getting myself ready.
Research shows me that residents of Perth started to be charged for water use in 1978.
I have been paying for water used since 1992.
Same here. We are learning to be less wasteful whilst waiting for our metre to be fitted.
I am now so accustomed to a water meter that I was surprised to find out how many UK homes still do not have a meter and simply pay a fixed charge, regardless of use. I have a smart water meter and this is useful - the water company recently sent me a note saying they suspected I had a leak. They noted constant but small overnight water use. Sure enough, when I checked, I had both a trickle through a cistern (limescale build up on the valve) and a small leak on the outside tap.
Hi
I have a somewhat unusual attitude to energy usage.
My ceiling lights , except in the lounge are all motion controlled, they only stay on for 2 minutes.
Heating is gas central heating, radiators only turned on in the lounge and bathroom.
I have two fish tanks,LED Lights on timers, the marine ones are on 10 hours a day.
They are both in the lounge, with heaters set at 25C all the time.
I use them as a form of heating, they give a good background heat to the room in the cooler months, use hardly any electricity in the summer.
The filters are very efficient, using less than 20 watts an hour but run all day.
I am also with Octoplus as a supplier, so I earn points for using less electricity at certain times of high demand, but I also get emails advising me of times when I get free electricity.
This is when the washing machine and cookers go on.
I do a lot of batch cooking.
It works for me.
This sounds similar in principle to the French tempo system - although ours is more stick than carrot. But the outcome is the same if you can adapt to two things. One is a non-electricity means of heating the house - otherwise you would freeze on the wrong days. The other is flexibility on when you do certain things such as cooking or run costly white goods. So being retired greatly helps (cook late in the evening and not care about getting up late the next morning) and having a detatched house rather than a flat (downstairs neighbours might object to the washing machine running though its spin cycle at 2am).
I also have an unusual (unusual by today’s standards) attitude to energy usage…If I’m cold I turn on the heating, if I’m hungry I fire up the oven or hob…or both. If it’s dark I put the lights on and leave them on if I’m constantly moving from one room to the next. I use as much water as required.
I hate the way energy companies assume that we were wasting energy before. If they can’t supply me with the water and energy I need they should get their house in order. We are living in the 21st century for God’s sake. Is the only progress we have made is with waste of space smartphones, netflix and other internet associated stuff…?.. 
You would have thought the best progress human technology could have made, was to produce and supply free energy, instead of building waste of space wind turbines, fields full of useless solar panels, and increasing the population of this small island until we are all short of stuff.
I am slowly changing all my bulbs to LEDs because I still have a lot of those fluorescent ones especially in fittings with several bulbs. They just seem to last for ever.
Yes, LED bulbs. Around thirty years ago we were bidding for a new large electrical project in a cement works. Our customer wanted to use LED lights. No problem - that’s what he wanted use. And that’s what I have used since including our own house. They cost about one tenth of a candescent bulb.
