Reducing your energy bills

Electricity bills like every other kind almost always seems to rise year on year. However, for the thrifty people amongst us, there are indeed ways to lower these bills and some are a lot more straightforward than you might think. All it involves is changing some habits that might have been engrained into you. By taking on board a plethora of subtle changes, you will be able to save a lot of money over the years.

The hardest habits to break are the oldest ones, especially when you do it day in day out. One of the biggest things that causes a spike in the increase in your electricity bill each month is leaving your appliances turned on.

This is something that we are actually all guilty of and whilst it can be a tricky habit to break, it is one that you should really try. Let us take the living room for example. How many devices are plugged in just now? Most likely your television is plugged in and turned on at the mains, along with some sort of player be it Blu Ray or DVD player. On top of this you might also have a satellite or cable box also plugged in and turned on.

This is fine if you’re using them but if you’re not then there is no need to have these devices turned on at all. Many will argue that it is ok if they’re turned off but in standbye mode since it burns hardly anything. This isn’t actually true since depending on the device it may actually still be burning a fair bit of energy.

An example of this would be Smart TV’s. Whether they are in normal operation mode or in standby mode they are still able to update themselves and the apps on them. Now, presuming that when you’re watching the TV that you are not using the apps that are updating, it would be a better solution to update them during normal viewing times. By having the TV on standby mode when you are not watching it still leads to energy being wasted on this device.

The same is true for DVD and Blu Ray players. When these aren’t being used they should be turned off completely so as to conserve energy. Not only is it helping the environment since less energy as a whole is being burnt, it is also helping your back pocket. Granted, for satellite and cable boxes the situation is a bit different especially if you are recording a series on it. In this case you wouldn’t be able to turn off said device completely since you would end up missing the show that you want to see.

Another key way in which you can cut your electricity bills is to use a completely different type of light bulb. For years, tungsten bulbs have been the norm and energy efficient ones were by and large neglected. This was for two reasons both of which were related to the infancy of the technology. The first issue is that these bulbs whilst efficient were extremely expensive to produce at the time. Therefore the uptake of them wasn’t what was originally hoped.

The second issue is that whilst they were much better at saving energy than their tungsten equivalent, the light output from them was not only lower, but it gave off a rather off putting yellow tinge when compared to the more conventional light bulb. Thankfully however both of these issues have now been rectified and year on year the sales of energy efficient light bulbs has increased.

Of course, as with the example of the living room above, you will see further savings with these bulbs if you ensure that you turn them off when you are not using them. To not do so is a sure fire way to be wasting money that could be better spent elsewhere.

You can of course also get in touch directly with your supplier to assess whether or not they will be able to assist you in reducing your electricity energy bills. Most will of course state that they are the cheapest on the market when it comes to electricity and there is little that they will be able to do for you in this regard.

However, as mentioned in another Hub, the simplest way to go about this is to simply ask for the disconnections department which is internally known as customer retentions. In customer retentions, they have a lot more discretion when it comes to haggling a better deal for the customer than the general customer service agent has within the call centre.

In customer retentions, their goal lives up to their name. They would rather make slightly less money off of you than they normally would instead of completely losing your customer altogether. However should it be the case that they are still not giving you the best deal then it would be much more beneficial for you to instead go down the route of migrating to a cheaper provider. EDF is actually fairly competitive in the electricity market and they have a strong track record of being able to give customers a discount in light of them leaving. You can find their relevant numbers here http://www.energycompanynumbers.co.uk/edf-electricity-number/