Back in my British Gas days energy efficiency wasn’t very high on my agenda. If a customer’s boiler was inefficient but working fine I’d tell them so. This was much to the annoyance of my manager – I routinely failed to meet sales targets and was occasionally threatened with disciplinary action.

Going back 2 years ago, gas was very cheap, Greta the outlay needed to upgrade to a more efficient boiler would take decades to make back.

My energy deal is due to expire at the end of April and after seeing how much I’m going to be paying got me thinking again about replacing inefficient yet working fine boilers.

I’d welcome anyone to correct the following non-scientific fag packet sums:

A constantly burning pilot light runs at around 170 watts of gas.

Over a 24h period that’s just over 4Kwh. At my new tariff of 10.087p that’s 41p a day or £150 a year. That gas isn’t all wasted as when the boiler is running it’s useful heat.

6 months of the year the boiler may be on for an hour a day for hot water, over the winter potentially 12 hours a day.

For the fag packet maths let’s say that over the year the boiler is running for 25% of the time. That is £110 a year wasted. Over the 20 year life of a boiler that’s £2250 saved before even looking at the efficiency gains of a modern condensing boiler with weather compensated controls. We’ve reached a point with gas prices that replacing old, inefficient boilers will usually pay for themselves.

If you have a warm air unit with integrated water heater that usually means 2 pilot lights so unfortunately twice as bad.

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