lowelectricity use

1,000–1,800kWh of electricity a year

lowConfidence

Electricity: low — roughly 1,000 to 1,800 kWh a year. This is a band, not a prediction — see below.

Not enough to go on yet

Not enough has been entered to draw a conclusion. Guessing from this would produce a confident answer that happened to be wrong, which is worse than no answer.

Confidence Low — this is a starting point, not a finding. More information would change it.

What we do not know

Your actual annual electricity usage. It is on your bill or in your online account, and it replaces everything estimated here. It would narrow the band, or replace it with a real figure.
What heats your home. It is the largest single factor in both bills, and an electric system uses roughly three times the electricity of a gas-heated home. It would narrow the band, or replace it with a real figure.
How many bedrooms the property has. It would narrow the band, or replace it with a real figure.
How many people live there. It would narrow the band, or replace it with a real figure.
Whether the home is occupied during the day. It would narrow the band, or replace it with a real figure.

What to do

Everything worth doing here is free.

Send a real meter reading
There is not enough to go on yet, so start with what costs nothing.
If your bill says "estimated", it is a guess based on what the supplier thinks you used — and estimates drift. Submitting an actual reading replaces the guess and rebills the period against it. This is the first thing to do when a bill looks wrong, because until it is done nobody knows whether the bill is wrong or the estimate is.
- Reduces how much energy you use
- Do it now
- 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.

The most useful next check

Find your annual usage in kWh

Your bill or online account states it. With that figure the calculators here become a check on your own bill rather than an estimate.

What this assumes

These are bands, not predictions. Two identical homes with different households routinely differ by a factor of two, which is wider than the difference between house sizes.
Based on Ofgem Typical Domestic Consumption Values, widened to reflect the real spread.

Worked out by energy rules 1.1.0. Nothing you entered leaves your browser.

Why this gives a band and not a number

It would be easy to turn nine answers into “11,847 kWh a year”. The number would look authoritative and it would be worthless.

Two identical houses next door to each other, with the same number of bedrooms and the same heating, routinely differ by a factor of two depending on who lives in them and how they live. That spread is wider than the difference between a two-bedroom flat and a four-bedroom house. Any single figure produced from a questionnaire is inside a very wide range, and quoting it without the range is the difference between an estimate and a fiction.

Where the bands come from

Ofgem publishes Typical Domestic Consumption Values — low, medium and high figures for a household’s annual gas and electricity. They exist for exactly this purpose, and they are published as three levels rather than one number for exactly this reason. The bands here are those levels, widened to reflect the real spread around them.

What actually moves the answer

Not the number of bedrooms, mostly. The things that change a household’s electricity by thousands of kilowatt hours are electric heating, charging a car at home, and an electric shower or immersion heater.

A one-bedroom flat that charges an electric vehicle uses more electricity than a four-bedroom house that does not — an EV adds roughly 2,000 to 3,500 kWh a year on ordinary mileage, which is more than a small home uses in total. This estimator weights it accordingly, which is why the answer can jump a band on a single question.

A real figure beats all of this

Your annual usage in kWh is on your bill and in your online account, usually on an annual statement. Entering it here replaces the estimate entirely rather than being averaged with it — mixing a fact with a guess produces something worse than either.

With a real figure, the tariff comparison becomes reliable rather than indicative, and the electricity cost calculator can be checked against your actual bill.

What to do with the answer

Use it to decide where to look, not to decide what to buy. If the band is higher than you expected, the free measurements come first: an overnight meter reading to find your base load, and a look at whether anything electric is heating when it should not be. Those cost nothing and answer more than any estimate can.