Due to the gas prices in Europe I decided to switch to using electric heaters last winter. I saved 2,600 euro's!

Last year, in the run up to the war in Ukraine, Russia managed to hike up the gas prices in an attempt to increase Europe's dependence on Russian gas. With a result that the past year European families have seen their gas bill increase, in some cases to obscene amounts.

In our case, our gas bill was increased from 80 euro's to 300 euro's a month. Combined with my GF not having consistent work during that period it brought us to a point of effectively living paycheck to paycheck.

So we made a choice; We did not want to go broke by paying our money to Russia to fund the war in Ukraine.

We had one more advantage; I had signed a 3 year fixed rate electricity contract in 2020 with extremely low rates. My electricity bill at that point was 5 euro's a month. In the dutch equivalent of this subreddit r/zuinig there were people claiming the electricity cost of their modem was more expensive than my entire household (and we have 4 laptops constantly running, a 60 inch tv and an American style fridge)

So, I closed off the main pipe of the heater and bought 3 electric space heaters for 30 euro's each. We aren't heating all rooms in our house, just the ones that are in use and only when we are in the room. And I must say; it worked well. I was not too cold in our house. The only issue was the bathroom where the steam from the shower would make the ice cold walls wet. So we paid extra attention to airing out the bathroom on a frequent basis.

Now we have been doing this for a year, gas prices are stabilizing again and we got the final invoice from the gas company; of the 3,600 euro's we paid for gas the last year, we get 2,600 euro's back and our gas bill will go back down to 99 euro's a month!

That's 2,600 euro's going to our savings account instead of the Russian military!