Practical ways to lower your energy bill

Where your energy bill actually comes from

Most Australian households get an electricity or gas bill every quarter, which is part of why energy costs are so easy to lose track of. Three months pass, the bill lands, and by then the usage that caused it is long forgotten.

Your bill is built from two separate things. There is a usage charge, based on how much energy you used. And there is a daily supply charge, which you pay simply for being connected, whether you used anything that day or not. That second charge is the reason a nearly empty holiday house still gets a bill.

There is a third factor that catches people out: the deal you signed up to often had a benefit period attached. Retailers advertise a discounted rate, and after twelve or twenty-four months that discount quietly ends. Your usage did not change. Your habits did not change. The rate did. If your bill has crept up without explanation, this is the first thing worth checking.

Read the plan you are already on

Before comparing anything, work out what you have. Every retailer has to give you a basic plan summary, and your bill carries most of the detail if you know where to look. Pull out your most recent one and find these five things.

• Your tariff type. Usually printed near the usage charges. It might say single rate, time of use, or something similar. This determines whether the time of day you use energy matters at all.
• The daily supply charge. A fixed cents-per-day figure. Two plans can have identical usage rates and still differ meaningfully because of this.
• Your usage rate. Cents per kilowatt hour. If you are on a time of use tariff there will be several rates, one for each time band.
• The benefit period end date. If your plan came with a discount, this tells you when it stops. Diarise it. It is the single most common reason a bill rises on its own.
• Whether a concession is applied. Concessions appear as a line item. If you are eligible and it is not showing, you are not receiving it.

Compare plans, but compare them properly

The government runs free comparison services, and they are the sensible starting point because they are not paid commissions by retailers. Energy Made Easy covers most of the country, and Victoria has its own equivalent. Both let you upload or enter your actual usage rather than guessing, which matters enormously. A plan that looks cheap for a small flat can be poor value for a family running a pool pump.

Comparing on the headline usage rate alone is the classic mistake. Weigh the usage rate against the daily supply charge together, in the context of how much you actually use. A low supply charge suits a light user. A low usage rate suits a heavy one.

Worth knowing: not everyone can switch. Retail competition exists across most of the eastern states and South Australia, but households in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and parts of regional Queensland have limited or no choice of retailer. If that is you, comparison will not help, but everything else in this article still will, and it is still worth ringing your retailer to ask whether you are on their best available rate.

Tariff types, and why timing only sometimes matters

Advice to run the dishwasher late at night gets repeated constantly, and for a lot of households it does absolutely nothing. Whether shifting your usage saves money depends entirely on your tariff.

• Single rate. You pay the same cents per kilowatt hour no matter when you use it. Running the washing machine at 2am costs exactly the same as running it at 6pm. Shifting usage saves you nothing.
• Time of use. Rates change across peak, shoulder and off peak periods. Here, moving heavy appliances out of the peak window genuinely reduces the bill. The exact hours vary by distributor, so check your bill rather than assuming.
• Controlled load. A separate cheaper circuit, usually for an electric hot water system or underfloor heating, which runs at times the network chooses. If you have one it appears as its own line on the bill.
• Demand tariff. Charges partly on your highest burst of usage during peak periods, not just the total. On these plans, avoiding running several hungry appliances simultaneously matters more than total consumption.

Heating and cooling habits

Heating and cooling is where most households have the greatest room to move, because it runs hard for months and then stops. Small changes to how you run it compound across a whole season.

The general principle is to close the gap between inside and outside temperature by as little as you can live with. Nudging the thermostat down a degree or two in winter, and up a degree or two in summer, reduces how hard the system has to work without anyone really noticing. Setting it to an extreme temperature does not heat or cool the room faster, it just runs the system longer.

• Heat or cool the room you are in, not the whole house. Close doors to rooms nobody is using.
• Block draughts around doors and windows. A door snake costs almost nothing and works.
• Use curtains and blinds deliberately: closed at night in winter to hold heat in, closed during the day in summer to keep sun out.
• Clean or replace the filters in your split system. A clogged filter makes the unit work harder for the same result.
• Run ceiling fans before reaching for the air conditioner. They use a fraction of the energy.

Standby power and the things always running

Standby power is easy to dismiss because each device draws so little. The point is not any single device, it is that they run continuously, all year, whether you are home or not. The same logic applies to larger always-on appliances, which are worth auditing once and then forgetting about. Walk through the house and look for these.

• A second fridge or freezer in the garage, often half empty and running constantly.
• Pool pumps, which are frequently set to run far longer each day than they need to.
• Heated towel rails left on around the clock rather than on a timer.
• Game consoles and set top boxes, which often sit in a high-draw standby state rather than truly off.
• Old electric hot water systems, and thermostats set hotter than anyone in the house actually wants.

Concessions, rebates and falling behind

Every state and territory runs concession schemes for energy, but the names, the eligibility rules and the amounts differ from one to the next, and they change. The reliable move is to check your own state or territory government website rather than trusting a summary you read somewhere. Concession card holders, pensioners and people receiving certain payments are the usual starting categories.

The critical detail is that a concession does not apply itself. You have to register it with your retailer, and it has to be linked to the account. Plenty of eligible households pay full price for years simply because nobody ever lodged the details. Check your bill for a concession line, and if it is missing, ring and ask.

If you are already struggling to pay, contact your retailer before the due date rather than after. Australian energy retailers are obliged to offer hardship assistance, which can mean a payment plan, more time, or in some cases help accessing government relief. It is not a favour, it is an obligation they carry. The worst outcome is silence.

Once the plan and the concessions are sorted, the remaining job is noticing when things drift. Quarterly bills are long enough apart that a rate rise or an expiring discount can pass unremarked for months. Keeping your energy accounts somewhere you actually look, whether that is a calendar reminder or a bill tracker like BillBuffer, is what turns a one-off tidy up into a habit that holds.