By the Home Savings Calculator team · 29 August 2026 · 8 min read
Here is the order, worked out from what each change is actually worth per year rather than how virtuous it feels. Run your own numbers in the electricity cost calculator first: whether usage or standing charge dominates your bill decides which half of this list applies to you.
Every electricity bill is two charges. The unit rate is what you pay per kilowatt-hour used. The standing charge is a fixed daily fee for being connected, and it lands whether the property is occupied or not.
If the standing charge is a large slice of your total, you are a low user and no amount of switching things off will help much — switching tariff will. If usage dominates, the reverse is true. Ten minutes with the calculator settles it, and it changes everything that follows.
Get your unit rate and standing charge off your last bill, put them into the electricity cost calculator, and look at the split. Everything below assumes you know that number.
In most homes heating and hot water dwarf everything else on the bill. A degree off the thermostat is worth several percent of the heating bill — more than switching every bulb in the house, and it costs nothing.
The order within heating is unglamorous: fix the thermostat and timer settings, then draught-proof, then insulate, then consider changing the heat source. People routinely do that list backwards and spend thousands before spending an afternoon. Compare fuels honestly with the heating cost calculator.
Standby power is real but small. What actually costs money is anything with a heating element or a motor that runs for hours: the tumble dryer, the immersion heater, an old fridge-freezer with failing seals, a second fridge in the garage nobody thinks about.
A plug-in energy monitor costs less than a takeaway and settles the argument in a week. Or start with the appliance energy cost calculator to see the typical ranking before you buy one.
Compare on both numbers, not the headline unit rate. A tariff with a lower unit rate and a higher standing charge can easily be worse for a low user, and the comparison sites do not always make that obvious.
If you have an electric vehicle or storage heating, an off-peak tariff is usually the single largest saving available to you — see the EV charging cost calculator for what that does to the annual figure.
Solar comes last on this list, not because it does not work, but because it is the only item that requires thousands of pounds up front. Its payback is also strongly affected by everything above it: the more of your generation you use yourself, the faster it pays back.
Do the cheap things first, re-measure, then run the solar panel calculator with your corrected usage figure. The answer will be more honest, and often better.
