Could you pay less for energy?
Work out whether your bill is high because of how much you use or because of what you pay per unit. The two have different answers and only one of them is switching.
Where the room to save is: not enough entered yet
Not enough yet to tell you anything useful
We need an annual usage figure and your rates before any of this means anything. Both are on a recent bill or in your online account.
Confidence Low — this is a starting point, not a finding. More information would change it.
What we do not know
- Your annual usage in kWh, and your unit rate and standing charge. Nothing can be worked out about a bill without them.
What to do
Everything worth doing here is free.
Find out what tariff you are actually on
There is not enough to go on yet, so start with what costs nothing.
Most people cannot name their tariff, and it is the prerequisite for comparing anything. Off a recent bill or your online account you want four things: the tariff name, the unit rate and standing charge for each fuel, whether it is fixed or variable, and — if it is fixed — the end date and any exit fee. Ten minutes, and without them any comparison is against a guess.
- Reduces how much energy you use
- A few minutes
- Free
- Evidence: moderate
How to tell if it worked: Read your meter before the change and again a week later, at the same time of day, and compare the two weeks.
Find your overnight base load
There is not enough to go on yet, so start with what costs nothing.
Take a meter reading last thing at night and again first thing, with nothing running that you would not expect. Divide the difference by the hours between them to get the constant draw of your home. Under about 0.1 kWh an hour is unremarkable; much above it means something substantial is running around the clock, and finding what is usually worth more than any other single change.
- Does not save anything by itself — tells you where to look
- A few minutes
- Free
- Evidence: strong
How to tell if it worked: Repeat the measurement after making a change and compare the two.
The most useful next check
Find your annual usage
A recent bill or your online account will have annual kWh for each fuel, along with your unit rate and standing charge. Those four numbers are all this needs.
What this assumes
- Your rates hold for a full year. A variable tariff moves with the cap, and a fixed one ends.
- Your usage over the next year matches the figure you entered.
- Electricity only — no gas usage was entered, so no gas cost is included.
Worked out by energy rules 1.1.0. Nothing you entered leaves your browser.
Can you show me what other suppliers charge?
Live supplier prices come from an accredited comparison service, and we have not got one yet. Everything above is worked out from your own figures in your browser.
We would rather say that than show you a list of prices we cannot stand behind. An accredited comparison service prices the whole market against your own consumption; a made-up average dressed as a quote is how people end up switching to a tariff that costs them more.
What you can do today, for nothing
If you have a quote or another tariff in front of you — from your own supplier, or one you have been sent — the tariff comparison works out which is cheaper on your usage, including the standing charge and any exit fee. It needs no partner because you supply both sides.
What we would send a comparison service, if we had one
Written down now, before it is possible, so the list can be argued about rather than discovered. It is the complete set — there is nothing else in the request.
- Your annual electricity usage in kWh.
- Your annual gas usage in kWh, if you gave one.
- Whether you are on a single-rate or Economy 7 meter.
- How you pay — direct debit, on receipt of bill, or prepayment.
- The first part of your postcode only, such as DN17. Energy rates vary by region and this is the least precise thing that identifies one.
- The rates you are on now, if you entered them, so a saving can be worked out against your actual tariff rather than an average.
- That you are comparing tariffs in Great Britain.
Not on that list, and not collected anywhere on this page: your name, your address, your full postcode, your email, your phone number, your account number, or any meter reading. The postcode field is the one thing a comparison genuinely needs that we do not ask for yet — there is nowhere to send it, so asking would be collecting it for its own sake. As it stands there is not enough entered to ask anybody anything.
Two different problems that produce the same bill
A bill is a quantity multiplied by a price, plus a fixed daily charge. So a bill that is higher than you would like has only three possible causes: you are using a lot, you are paying a lot per unit, or the fixed part is large relative to a small bill. They are not the same problem and they do not have the same answer.
Almost every “save on energy” page on the web assumes the second and goes straight to comparing suppliers. If your consumption is well above what a property like yours should use, switching moves you to a slightly cheaper price for a quantity that is the actual problem — and the saving is a fraction of what finding the cause would get you.
The number almost nobody knows about their own energy
Your all-in cost per kWh: everything you pay in a year divided by every kWh you use, standing charge included. It is the honest price of your energy, and it is always higher than the unit rate on your tariff. In a low-usage home it can be dramatically higher, because the same fixed daily charge is spread over less energy.
It is also the figure that makes tariff comparison make sense. Two tariffs with the same unit rate and different standing charges are different prices, and which one is cheaper depends on how much you use — which is why the tariff comparison asks for your usage before it will compare anything.
How we judge whether your usage is high
Against the range we would expect for a property of that type, size and occupancy, from the same model behind the household energy estimator. That model produces a band rather than a figure, because two identical houses with different households routinely differ by a factor of two — wider than the difference between house sizes.
If you skip the questions about your home, we can still tell you exactly what you are paying and how it splits. What we cannot tell you is whether that is a lot, which is the part that decides where to look.
What this cannot do, and what would fix that
It cannot tell you whether your unit rate is competitive. That is not a limitation of the arithmetic; it is that nobody can answer it without live prices from every supplier, which comes from a comparison service accredited under Ofgem’s Confidence Code. We have not got one. When we do, this page is where its results will appear, ranked by total annual cost for your own usage rather than by unit rate or by anything a supplier pays us.
Until then the page stops at the useful half, and the manual tariff comparison handles the case where you already have a quote in front of you.
Fixed deals, exit fees and timing
If you are on a fixed tariff, when it ends and what it costs to leave are as important as the rates. A saving that takes eighteen months to repay an exit fee is not a saving if the deal you are moving to lasts twelve. Suppliers generally drop exit fees in the final weeks of a fixed term, so a deal ending soon may be worth waiting out — check your own terms, because the period is not the same everywhere.