‘Heat the human, not the home’: Martin Lewis guide for ‘desperate’ households

theguardian.com:

The UK’s best known consumer finance journalist, Martin Lewis, was uncharacteristically downbeat about the new edition of his newsletter, which went out to 8.4 million UK subscribers on Wednesday morning, writing: “This is a guide I really wish we needn’t be publishing.”

Lewis’s Money Saving Expert newsletter is normally, and famously, packed with scores of top tips and tricks to help subscribers navigate the complex world of loans, insurance and utility bills grab the best deals, from shopping to holidays.

This week’s edition, however, concerns the cost of living crisis. The content of How to Heat the Human Not the Home is more self-help and survival guide than consumer in tone. The grim background to this ingenious and oddly depressing initiative is that in the UK in 2022 millions are so hard up they can’t heat their home.

“I felt sad asking my team to put this together,” Lewis tweeted. “But my email bag is full of folk so desperate they can’t put the heat on, I wanted to try some help.”

The guide is a practical list of options if you can’t afford to heat your home – a reality for many as the energy price cap rises and average bills shoot up to £2,000 a year, and millions of households slide into fuel poverty. Lewis admitted recently he was nearly out of conventional money-saving tools when it came to energy bills.

The guide discusses in forensic detail the costs and relative effectiveness of a range of alternatives to switching off the central heating, from heated insoles (less than 1p an hour) to hot-water bottles (6p an hour, assuming you boil 1.7 litre capacity kettle twice a day).

It advises on the right clothes to wear, the basic science of base, mid and outer layers, and where to buy them most cheaply, and notes the