With the massive rise in fuel costs, and the rises still yet to come, it seemed a good idea to try to give some insight into how to save a little on your costs. Many keep asking why their bills are so high (some being 3 times as high as before) and, although in some cases it is hard to offer any advice other than it’s just because of the rising costs, there are things you can do to try drop your usage down which, in turn, will help drop those extortionate bills.
How do they work out what to charge me for electricity?
Your energy bill is calculated based on your kilo-watt hour usage. A Kilowatt (kW) is 1000 watts (W) so if you have an electrical appliance that uses 1kW and you use that for an hour then that would be 1 kilo-watt hour (kWh), for example a kettle can use up to 3000W (3kW) so if you use that for 1 hour you will use 3KWH of energy. With a rough national average (it can vary between provider and location) being around 19p/kWh then for every kW you use for an hour it will cost you 19p, so for a 3kW kettle used for one hour it will cost you 3 x 19p = 57p.
How can I use less electricity?
To put it simply, use less. That is not meant to be patronising but to purely point out how simple it can be. Have a look at https://www.daftlogic.com/information-appliance-power-consumption.htm to get a rough idea of what each appliance in your house is using and see where you can use the high demand items less or potentially swap them to more efficient versions. As an example, if you have a 2kW wall heater you could look at replacing it with a 550w (0.55kW) which would take just over a quarter of the energy usage to run. But you would need to factor in the cost efficiency of this. Check out our cost efficiency calculator to see how many hours it would take for a replacement item to pay for itself. Also bear in mind that as energy prices rise it will take less time for the appliance to pay for itself so it may be worth checking potential expected kWh costs that are coming up and measuring against them also.
