I live in a cold part of Durban, due to the position of my house in a valley, so in winter you can imagine how cold it gets.
During the first year of l living here about three years ago, my winter electricity bill came to around R1800. This is a substantial amount of money just for electricity. The problem is the cost of heating. Your geyser works twice as much and you tend to use heaters to warm up the area.
The first thing that I could do was control the geyser. Instead of letting it run 24 hours a day, I cut it down to just 2 hours, in the morning, I'd turn it on about an hour before my morning shower. This worked but by supper time we didn't have any hot water in the house, so I increased the geyser time to 3 hours a day. 2 in the morning and 1 hour at night. The system worked perfectly, we had hot water the whole day with just 3 hours of operation.
The next thing that I had to cut out was the electric heating appliances. Wether it is designated as a energy efficient heater or not, it's still going to suck juice. Saw the only solution was to switch to a different energy source, which was gas. I pulled out the camping gas heater, it's got a 3kg cylinder which costs me about R60 a month.
The combination of these two solutions alone brought my electricity bill down to +-R500. The next step that I am going to take is converting the stove to gas. This should be another big game changer in the fight against high electricity usage and Eskoms high energy costs.
