Cut your gas and electricity bill

The Basics:
This is perhaps the easiest way to save money possible. If you haven’t changed supplier since the gas and electricity markets were opened up to competition you are almost undoubtably paying too much. A mix of regulation and competition laws means the old incumbent suppliers, that’s British Gas and your regional electricity company, charge substantially more than the cheapest on the market. If you have already switched supplier, then ensuring you’ve switched to the very cheapest can still cut your bills by up to 10%.

Shifting supplier is not a big deal, you keep the same pipes, circuits and wires, the only difference is the customer service and billing. Your new supplier will perform the switch for you - all you need do is sign the right forms and take a meter reading.

Choosing the supplier:
Finding the right supplier on your own is very difficult as which provider is the cheapest for you depends on where you live and your own individual usage. There’s no hard and fast rule. However a range of phone and internet comparison services do all the work for you. They are listed on the website of the energy regulator Ofgem. You simply plug in your details, either guessing, from a past bill or best of all using your Kilowatt hours and they tell you exactly who your cheapest is. Of the websites available www.uswitch.com offers the largest selection of variables and gives the most accurate answer, though it takes slightly longer whereas www.buy.co.uk is the easiest to use.

Even with these comparison engines there are a number of things to watch

Dual Fuel isn’t cheaper. Energy companies try to persuade us that getting gas and electricity from the same suppler makes it cheaper. However in the vast majority of cases it’s more expensive than using the cheapest standalone suppliers.

Direct Debit is cheaper You can save up to 10% paying by fixed monthly direct debit. This means you pay a set amount straight from your bank account. If you’ve overpaid you will be refunded at the end of the year. If you’ve underpaid you will need to pay the extra. The reason this is cheaper is that the companies are sure you won’t default and they earn extra interest on your money due to the overpayments.

Know your KiloWatt hours
Comparison sites require your postcode and estimated current bills, but be ultra nerdy and use the KiloWatt hours figure and your result will be more accurate.

How much can you save: A family in Manchester spending £700 a year with their regional electricity company and British Gas’s standard policy paying each quarter could save around 15% by switching to the cheapest providers or 25% using direct debit. That’s over £165 a year, more than enough to for a weekend away with a cosy log cabin with a real fire for warmth.

Added extra: If there is someone over 60 living in your house - one energy supplier TXU energi (formerly Norweb and Eastern Energy) provides a special flat fee service called StayWarm. You get both of your gas and electricity from Staywarm, but rather than paying a fee depending on how much energy you use, you simply pay a fee depending on the number of people and rooms in your house. This service provides the surety that you always know how much you will be paying. It is often the cheapest, but not always, the best thing to do is find the cheapest normal suppliers using the recipe above, then compare it to StayWarm.

You can choose to have Green Energy supply. What this means in fact is energy companies use environmentally friendly sources of energy to an amount equivalent of all people choosing the green tariff. It is slightly more expensive, but you can still use the price comparison engines to find the cheapest for you.