Electric bill - how to reduce?

We got one of those monitors free with our price plan and its scary what gobbles juice. They are £30 on e bay so you could buy one if you have the spare pennies and see what is the drain in your house.

Ours:

Kettle - Ours goes a few seconds past boiling then the auto switch off happens. Stand there and watch it while it boils and switch off yourself.

PC - used to switch off but leave router plugged in. Now everything incl printer/external hard drive gets unplugged.

Lights - those halogen spotlights are very hungry.

Chargers - Make sure they are switched off at the plug.

Oven - again very hungry. Dont forget about it while warming up. Once its hot get the food in.

Hob - use the size appropriate ring for size of pot.

HTH

You say this was your first reading 'in a year or so'. You need to check how long it was. Suppliers are obliged to read their customers' meters at least once every 15 months. You also need to check how far back your bill has been corrected: if suppliers fail to read meters as they should, they can only correct your bill back as far as one year. Your DD will be including your increased consumption but will also more than likely also include a payment towards the inevitable debt that will be showing on your account now as a result of the previous under-estimation of your account. You could contact the supplier and ask how much of the payment is for this and, if they're arranging for you to clear it over 12 months as is usually the case, ask if you could do it over 24 months instead if you're struggling to find the increased DD payment hard to make.

In terms of your usgae you could make sure you turn off unnecessary lights, turn electrical equipment off instead of on standby as you say and check that your supplier provides the best deal in your area. You may only be able to save pennies at the moment but they all add up.

It's also really important that you check your bills and provide your supplier with an accurate reading so they can correct your account and make sure you're only paying for the energy you use.

Hope that's helpful.

This is a NZ website, but it is packed with energy saving tips and suggestions:

http://www.mercury.co.nz/residential/savepowersavemoney.aspx

They're very big on powersaving over here at the moment, as there was fear earlier in the year that there would be power cuts due to lack of resources, so everyone was encouraged to cut back on consumption.

Yowch that is a big hike, I agree with all thats been suggested so far

We have made our efforts by cutting down on the freezer (we had two little ones in use, we now just use one), turn off all lights / electrical items when not in use etc

Is this just electric or gas as well?? If gas as well, only heat water when you need it, (we have managed to get round that by having showers etc at the gym so we are using their water not ours), only running the washing machine when you need it, doing full loads not half loads, we dont have a dishwasher (well other than my H)

We have managed to monitor our usage by taking meter readings on the 1st of every month and supplying them to the energy company, its certainly stopped any unexpected bills, in fact our energy company keep asking us to check our readings as they are unusally low... (our gas reading has only increased by about 4 units since the winter..)

Regarding bills, another thing you need to keep out for is overpaying them - because a fair chunk of the increased direct debit is designed to compensate for previous underpayments, and they'll carry on happily deducting the same increased amount even when it's no longer necessary.

After a year or so of paying a similar amount to our gas supplier, we got a bill for minus fifty quid - in other words, they owed us money! So we queried this, and it transpired that all the previous underpayments had been paid off, and we'd been massively overpaying them for months. If I remember rightly, our direct debit is now about half what it was as a result.

I was actually advised that using a dishwasher (make sure its full and on an energay saving programme) it more efficient than handwashing dishes.

- Make sure washing machine always runs a full load and dry washing outside/on an airer, not in the tumble drier.

- If your freezer isn't full, stuff the gaps with newspaper or plastic bags to fill the gaps.

- Cook 2 x the amount you need with meals, then freeze the extra 1/2. Cheaper to then reheat in microwave at another meal time. Where possible, use the microwave to cook veg etc as a much cheaper way of cooking.

- Make sure you put on an extra layer of clothing (jumper etc) instead of sticking the heating on (like my OH doe while wearing shorts!)

- Shower instead of bath.

- Is your loft well insulated? (Which reminds me, we moved last year and ours isn't ?)

Apparently the microwave clock takes more energy to run than the actual cooking does. There are loads of things that can be done in the microwave that I would have thought, corn on the cob, salmon filets etc.