10 ways to save on energy bills

Using your heating and appliances more efficiently will make a big difference to your energy costs. Follow our 10 tips to use less and pay less, while making your home more comfortable.

If you've not fixed an energy deal recently and are on a variable tariff that's increasing with the energy price cap, you may find you can make some long term savings by fixing a deal that's cheaper than future price rise predictions. 

But no matter your energy tariff, the steps you take to be more efficient can still make a difference.

That's because it's your energy unit rates – how much you pay for each kilowatt hour (kWh) of gas or electricity you use – that are fixed or capped, rather than your total bill. So the less energy you use, the less you'll pay.

Small habitual changes add up, especially as energy costs continue to rise. And some of the tips below take just a few minutes to set up.

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1. Use your appliances efficiently

Washer dryers are the priciest appliances to run, costing over £200 on average per year, according to our testing.

Condenser tumble dryers and American-style fridge freezers are also costly to use, both adding over £100 per year in electricity on average to our bills.

Changing how you use them will make a positive difference to your energy payments. Try these tips:

• Wash your clothes at a lower temperature Doing your laundry at 30ºC (rather than 40ºC) cuts the cost by 38%, according to our tests.
• Wash bigger loads less often Over-washing can cause fading, shrinkage and mis-shaping, as well as cost you more in electricity.
• Run your dishwasher only when it's full and stacked so that every item gets well cleaned (see the best way to load your dishwasher).
• Use eco settings on any of your appliances that have them.
• Fully turn off your wireless speaker or sound bar They're the most power-hungry gadgets in standby, costing around £6 per year (based on 20 standby hours per day).
• Dry laundry outside when the weather permits, rather than using a tumble dryer.
• Tumble dry different fabrics separately because they take different lengths of time to dry. Avoid drying single garments.
• Wait for food to cool before freezing and defrost frozen food in the fridge.
• Keep appliances clean Regularly descaling your kettle, defrosting your freezer, cleaning your tumble dryer's lint filter and cleaning the coils at the back of your fridge helps them run as efficiently as possible.

Find out how much your appliances cost to run.

2. Add insulation wherever you can

Improving your insulation will have the most impact on your bills of any of our tips. 

Adding insulation can cost as little as £15 (that's for DIY fitting foam insulation around exposed hot water pipes). The more you add, the more you'll save. 

Loft insulation is the cheapest and easiest way to boost your home's insulation credentials. If you have none and add the recommended 270mm, you could save up to £200 per year in a semi-detached house. Plus you'll feel cosier too.

Once that's done, consider cavity wall insulation if your home is suitable. It's pricey – around £2,700 for a semi-detached house, according to the Energy Saving Trust – but a third of your heat is lost through your walls. For older homes, you'll need solid wall insulation instead.

Read our full loft insulation, cavity wall insulation and solid wall insulation guides to learn what you need, how much it costs and what you could save.

Find out more about how to insulate your home. 

3. Improve your draughtproofing

Stopping heat from escaping through gaps around doors and windows could save you around £35 a year, according to the Energy Saving Trust.

It can help make your home feel more cosy at lower temperatures, too.

Professional draughtproofing of your whole house costs around £250, but there are plenty of DIY draughtproofing jobs.

Start with these areas:

• Windows Use draughtproofing strips around the frame. Brush strips work better for sash windows.
• Doors Use draughtproofing strips around the edges and brush or hinged-flap draught excluders at the bottom.
• Chimney and fireplace If you don't use your fireplace, block the chimney with an inflatable pillow or fit a cap over the chimney pot. If you have an open chimney, this could save you £50 a year.
• Floorboards and skirting Floorboards need to move, so use a flexible silicone-based filler in the gaps.
• Loft hatches Use draughtproofing foam strips to keep heat in.

Just remember that you do need some ventilation in your home, so don't cover up holes that are supposed to be there, such as trickle vents in window frames.

Already repaired large draughty areas? See our guide to draughtproofing for tips on draughts from keyholes and letterboxes.

4. Check if you could save money by switching energy supplier 

You could save some money by switching energy supplier or tariff. 

Use our free energy price comparison tool to see available gas and electricity tariffs. Keep in mind that prices on Ofgem's price-capped tariff will change every three months, so your potential savings would too.

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If you're not keen to switch, there are still things you can do to save:

• If you get paper bills, change to paperless ones and manage your account online instead. Some companies charge customers for paper billing.
• Pay by direct debit. It's usually cheaper and gives you the biggest choice of fixed deals. Prepayment price-capped tariffs are cheaper than direct debit ones at the moment, but there is very little choice of fixed deals.
• Send your supplier regular meter readings, if you don't have a smart meter that does this. Regular meter readings keep your payments accurate and prevent estimated bills.
• Question any direct debit increases you don't agree with. Ask your supplier to explain why you need to pay more. Over a year, your usage and payments should balance out.
• Ask for a refund of any excess credit in your account. Or ask for your direct debit to be reduced while you use it up. We'd recommend you keep around two to three months' worth of payments in your account.

Read more: how to get the best energy deal and energy tariffs explained. 

5. Service your boiler and adjust its flow temperature

You may not be using your boiler efficiently, which will make your home more expensive to heat over winter. 

Start by booking a boiler service and asking your engineer to make sure it's running as efficiently as possible. 

Make the most of your appointment with our guide to how to get the best out of your boiler service. 

Replacing a very old and inefficient boiler can considerably improve your home's efficiency, but as they are so expensive to buy, we wouldn't recommend replacing a boiler until you need to.

Adjusting your boiler's flow temperature 

Lowering your combi boiler's flow temperature is quick and can lower your bills straight away. Condensing combi boilers tend to have heating flow temperatures set to 75-80°C, but many homes with one can be suitably warmed at 50-70°C. 

You could save 6-8% on your gas bills by lowering a combi boiler's radiator flow to 50%, according to the Heating and Hotwater Industry Council (HHIC) in 2022. 

If your boiler was installed after April 2005, it will be a condensing boiler. 

The extent to which you can decrease your boiler’s heating flow temperature is highly individual. But lowering it means your boiler uses less gas and runs more efficiently. So you'll save money and your home will still be warm.

Start with a small change and see if you're comfortable before lowering it further. 

The HHIC recommends that you adapt your boiler settings with the advice of a boiler engineer. 

However, if you've made sure it's safe and you've checked your boiler's technical manual, you can adjust these settings yourself via your boiler controls. 

The flow temperature for heating is generally symbolised by a little picture of a radiator, and a picture of a tap for hot water. Up and down arrows will change the temperature settings. 

Nesta has created an interactive boiler temperature tool to walk combi boiler owners through changing your heating's flow temperature settings.

6. Make use of heating controls

This autumn, update and get to grips with your heating controls so you're ready to heat your home efficiently when temperatures drop.

Heating controls enable you to:

• set your heating and hot water to turn on and off to suit you
• heat only the parts of your home that need it
• set different temperatures for different areas of your home
• keep your home at a temperature that’s comfortable, without wasting heat.

Installing a room thermostat, programmer or thermostatic radiator valves (and using them well) could save a typical household around £95 per year on energy bills each year, according to Energy Saving Trust. 

It costs around £860 to install the lot in a typical semi-detached home and will take around three years to see savings.

If you already have a thermostat and programmer, installing thermostatic radiator valves could save £30 a year if you then use them well. Try these tips to use heat as efficiently as possible:

• keep a gap between your radiators and furniture
• make sure curtains aren’t hanging in front of radiators
• remove radiator covers
• bleed your radiators to remove cold spots.

If you only have one thermostat for your home, turning it down by 1°C in winter would save you around £80 a year, according to Energy Saving Trust. 

For most people, the lowest comfortable temperature to set your heating at is somewhere between 18°C and 21°C.

Read more on how boiler controls can save you money.

Electric heaters

Electric heaters are best used sparingly. Electricity is much pricier than gas, so costs will quickly mount up. Plus our tests found that some heaters don't have very good thermostats so don't give you the room temperature you want.

On the whole, for short bursts you're better off heating yourself rather than the air – using extra clothes, hot water bottles and electric blankets and heated throws. 

If you are using an electric heater, try using your smart meter monitor to compare how much it costs to run an electric heater compared with turning on your central heating.

Find out more about buying the best electric heater for your home.

7. Use less hot water

You use energy year-round to heat your water. So heating and using it wisely will impact your bills.

If you have a hot water tank (rather than a combi boiler), use your heating controls to turn your water heating on and off, so you only heat as much water as you'll need.

High-volume power showers can use more water in less than five minutes than running a bath, so fit an eco shower head. Your shower will still feel powerful, but it'll cut down on your hot water use. 

Try using a shower timer to keep your shower to four minutes or less. This can save a typical household £55 a year on energy, according to the Energy Saving Trust. You'd also save money on water, if you have a meter.

Avoid washing up under a free-running tap. Wash up in the sink or a bowl instead. Also try not to leave the hot tap running for too long while you're rinsing items.

Fitting an aerator onto your kitchen tap will reduce the amount of hot water coming out. It could save you £19 a year.

8. Make the most of smart thermostats and smart tech

Smart thermostats let you operate your heating remotely via your mobile phone, tablet or computer. Some can also learn your routine or adjust your settings depending on the weather conditions.

Coupled with smart thermostatic radiator valves, you can control exactly which rooms are heated, and which aren't. 

For example, you might want the radiator in your living room to turn on when you come home from work, your bedroom to stay cold until later in the evening, and your kitchen to warm up in the morning. Just make sure all the kit you buy is compatible with the rest so that you can use it most effectively.

Thermostatic radiator valves (TRVs) aren't all digital. Traditional ones allow you to manually turn down the radiators in rooms you're not using.

Whether a smart thermostat could save you money will depend on your lifestyle and how efficiently you control your heating already. 

See the best smart thermostats.

Energy-saving apps

Some energy companies' customer apps give detailed information about your energy use, particular if you have smart meters. There are third-party apps which do this too.

A smart meter shows you how much energy you’re using and how much it costs, in close to real-time. You can use this to work out where and when you can cut back on how much you use.

Smart thermostats, such as Hive or Nest, also come with apps, as does Samsung's SmartThings hub. 

Apps such as the Energy Cost Calculator tell you exactly how much energy your products use. Enter the energy consumption of an appliance in kWh (look on its packaging or online spec), how many hours you use it and how much your electricity costs per kWh. The app gives a cost per usage by day, month or year, plus its CO2 emissions.

9. Make your next appliances energy efficient models

Buying a very cheap appliance can be a false economy if it ends up costing a fortune to run. 

Choosing energy-efficient appliances can save you hundreds of pounds each year in running costs compared with the most power-guzzling products. 

Running costs are now included in our appliance reviews. We test energy consumption in a way that reflects how you actually use appliances. 

For example we test washing machines on the 40°C cottons program because that's most commonly used by Which? members (rather than the 60°C cottons program which makes up 60% of EU Energy Label tests).

Then we use the results of our energy tests to calculate how much each appliance will cost you to run. We update this every time the price of electricity and gas change. 

Read more about how much your appliances cost to run to see which use the most energy and get tips on how to minimise your spend.

10. Check your eligibility for energy efficiency grants or extra benefits

Energy schemes and grants can help pay your energy bills or support you with the costs of renewable heating. These include:

• Warm Home Discount £150, mainly to pensioners and those who get certain benefits in Great Britain.
• Winter Fuel Payment £100-£300 per winter for those born before 23 September 1958, receiving pension credit or other means-tested benefits, and living in England or Wales.
• Boiler Upgrade scheme Up to £7,500 to replace your current gas or oil heating with low-carbon heating.
• The Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme Help with insulation and energy-efficiency measures for those on low incomes. The Great British Insulation Scheme is open to anyone living in a home in council tax bands A-D in England and A-E in Scotland or Wales that has an Energy Performance Certificate rating of D-G.

Find out what home energy grants you're eligible for.