Submitted by Bill Fernie
2nd October 2026
If you live in Caithness and heat your home with oil, there is probably no need for anybody to explain to you that heating oil is expensive.
You have probably already checked the tank and you may even have checked the price twice, just in case the first time was a mistake.
Unfortunately, it wasn't.
Heating oil is currently around £1.20 a litre in the Caithness area, according to current price comparisons. That is considerably better than the frightening £1.40-plus prices seen earlier in the year, but it is still a long way from the days when filling the tank did not feel like making a major household investment.
And so perhaps it is time for the traditional Caithness winter energy strategy to make another appearance.
Get the woolly jumpers out.
For many households, particularly those who have lived through previous periods of expensive heating, the answer is not necessarily to keep the whole house at summer temperatures all winter. It is to think carefully about where the heat is needed and when it is needed.
That does not mean sitting shivering in the dark. It means remembering that a jumper is considerably cheaper than a tank of heating oil.
The difference today is that we have become rather more sophisticated about it.
Thermal socks, fleece jackets, heated blankets, hot-water bottles and even heated gilets have all joined the battle against the Scottish winter. The old-fashioned jumper has acquired quite an impressive support team.
The economics are fairly simple.
Every litre of heating oil contains a useful amount of energy, but the cost of buying that energy has risen dramatically compared with the prices many households remember. A house that needs several hundred litres over the winter can therefore turn a seemingly small increase in the price per litre into hundreds of pounds.
For somebody on a fixed income, that is not an insignificant difference.
The other problem is that heating oil is only one part of the household energy bill. Electricity remains important for lighting, cooking, appliances and, increasingly, for households using electric heaters or heat pumps to reduce their reliance on oil.
That means the old assumption that you simply turn up the thermostat when it gets cold is becoming an increasingly expensive habit.
There is, however, a positive side to the current situation.
The price is not £1.45 a litre.
It is around £1.20.
That may not sound like much of a victory, but on 1,000 litres it represents roughly £250 less than paying £1.45 a litre.
For anyone looking at an almost empty tank, that difference matters.
But £1.20 is still nowhere near the roughly 66p a litre prices that some households remember from earlier in the year. The lesson is perhaps not that the heating-oil crisis has disappeared, but that prices can move surprisingly quickly in either direction.
And that makes planning rather more important.
If you have room in the household budget, building up a little reserve before the tank becomes desperate can give you some protection against another sudden price rise. It does not mean filling a tank at any price. It means avoiding being forced to buy because the gauge has reached the bottom and you have no choice.
For Caithness households, this is becoming part of a much wider conversation about resilience.
The weather will get colder. Oil prices will move around. Electricity prices will change. Food and transport costs can move in the wrong direction at the same time.
Nobody can control all of that.
But there are some things households can control.
How much of the house is heated. When the heating comes on. Whether unused rooms need to be warm. Whether doors and curtains are doing their job. Whether a little extra clothing can keep a person comfortable without heating another few cubic metres of air.
It is not glamorous.
It certainly isn't high technology.
But then again, neither is a woolly jumper.
And at £1.20 a litre, the woolly jumper may yet prove to be one of the cheapest energy-saving devices in Caithness this winter.