The average home electricity bill in the UK last year was £679. If you paid that sort of energy bill throughout your adult life, for say 60 years, then you’d be spending more than £40K on electricity. Of course, there are many factors that will impact on that final back-of-the-envelope tally, but it’s a lot of money.

So, it would be good to have a bit more information about exactly what is contributing to your electricity bill, and then be able to use that to make changes that could ultimately save you money.

One way to do that is to get to grips with how much each individual appliance or device in your home is adding to your electricity bill. 

The benefits of knowing more 

Once you find out how you use electricity in your home, then you can start making smart, energy-saving decisions about using less. 

Just seeing how much your electricity use costs you each day has an impact on how much you use too. This is called the ‘feedback effect’ and most households can easily cut >5% from their usage in this way. Some households could save up to £450, so it’s well worth getting clued up.

Four steps to better energy awareness

By following just four steps you can take back control of your energy use and see how much you can save.

Before you start, you’ll need to be signed up to Loop. Then you’re ready to go. Here are the four steps:

Step 1: Print the Loop Snoop map or add your costs to the interactive PDF text boxes.

Step 2: Turn off all your appliances so you have the lowest possible energy use in your home. The exceptions are your fridge, freezer and broadband router.

Step 3: Open the Loop app and look at Live view or your smart meter in-home display. 

Step 4: Write down each cost and see how much individual appliances are costing you to run per hour. It’s really simple, but you can find more details about using the app to do this here.

That’s it. By doing this in each room, you’ll get a good idea of how much things in your home cost to run. You can then start making clued-up decisions about how to use less energy and cut those bills.

You might find some surprises along the way. One Loop user said they discovered their coffee machine was sucking power when it wasn’t turned on, so now they always turn it off at the switch. Another found that some of their lights were consuming eight times more electricity than others, while their old tumble dryer was so inefficient it was contributing nearly a third of their monthly bill.

Every household is likely to find appliances or devices that are contributing more than expected to their bills. With that knowledge, you can get to work cutting back your energy bills.